Mighty Things
by KnightedRogue
Summary: A multichapter story of spying and spy games ... or the beginnings of it, at least. HSLO, post-ROTJ. Updated January 9; chapter 7.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Mighty Things

Era: Post-RoTJ; 6ABY

Warnings: Language, sensuality.

Summary: A multichapter story of what would have happened if they didn't do what they were supposed to do. HSLO, post-ROTJ.

AN: This is a preface, of sorts, to a series of vignettes I have written, all based on the idea that Han and Leia joined New Republic Intelligence instead of pursuing diplomatic and military careers. To read in order, begin with this story, then to "Solo's Girl", then "Of Bruises and Whores", then "The Infinite Pleasures of Paperwork", then "Dusting Off" and concluding with "Urdur".

AN2: Many thanks to the various people to whom I whined about dramatic!Han and uncooperative!Leia and, omiGOD, this story is too long, particularly my sounding board, Ms. HoldoutTrout. Thanks!

* * *

"Mighty things from small beginnings grow." (Dryden, Annus Mirabilis)

* * *

At midday, the newly-reconstructed Imperial palace nearly buzzed with the hurried air of governance at work. Couriers paced the halls, packages and signatures in hand, bustling against aides and undersecretaries and other couriers as they turned corners and pushed through crowds. The lifts were never quiet, and their low hum echoed from hallway to hallway, lost in the muffled cacophony that was the conversation outside Leia Organa's office door. The din grew as See-Threepio entered the room, then flattened as the door slid shut, replaced by a grinding noise; the woman in the padded chair realized it must be coming from the droid himself.

"Threepio," she said. "How long has it been since we replaced your motivators?"

If he could have done it, the droid may have looked chagrined as he shifted his armload onto her desk. "It has been just over 3.4 months, Mistress Leia, and nearly two weeks longer than _that_ since I had my last oil bath."

_Well, then_, Leia thought. _That explains it._ "Could you schedule that sometime soon, then?"

"Of course. Do you want it scheduled this week or next? Perhaps it would be better if it were scheduled sooner rather than - "

She kept her voice low. "It doesn't matter. Schedule it."

"Of course, Mistress Leia." He moved towards her data collection, stacked perilously high against the far wall of her office, and tapped out a command against the file control. "It appears that the Senate Advisory Committee is holding an emergency meeting in preparation of the first round of elections. Will you be presiding that or will Mon Mothma be doing the honors?"

"I imagine she will." In truth, Leia was dreading the upcoming elections. The polls thus far anticipated a young senate with very little representative experience. As member worlds sorted out the disintegration of the moff system, the political battlefront had turned up a new breed of politicians. The list of officially-declared inner-core candidates was downright frightening; she'd taken one look at it, and decided from then on to keep a copy of the Declaration of a New Republic stashed inside her private datapad, just in case.

The other members of the old provisional council were much more optimistic than she was. Borsk Fey'lya was a shoe-in for the Kothlis seat, as was Sian Tevv for Sullust and Kerrithrarr for the Mytaranor Sector, and all three were very favorable to this new athletic breed of politician. Ackbar, concerned with cleaning up Coruscant after the take-over, was more worried about the military budget than the elections, and Doman Beruss and Verrinnefra found the change in political opponents refreshing and potentially exciting.

Mon Mothma and Leia, neither seeking a senatorial seat, were more concerned than their peers about the potential attitude of the first senate. Leia spent a great deal of time reminding herself that this insecurity was a natural consequence of member elections. The freedom to choose representation was the freedom to choose bad representation, and Leia, as much a veteran of the rebellion as anyone, could not violate that freedom.

It was just very difficult, sometimes, to allow people to make mistakes.

"Threepio," she refocused on the droid, "has the _Mon Remonda_ checked in yet?"

He straightened up and managed to look petulant. "No, Mistress Leia. Were we expecting a situation report?"

She wasn't sure whether to be evasive or nonchalant and was settling for cold diplomacy when her office door opened again and a small woman with explosively white hair passed through. Careful grace was imbedded in the very way she walked, and a small bag was hooked over her right shoulder. "A report on what?"

"Nothing. What do you have?"

"Well," Winter sat at the chair directly across from Leia's desk and folded her legs beneath her. "I have both official and unofficial news." She removed a datapad from her bag and flipped through a few files. "I'm assuming I'm conducting the official debriefing first?"

Leia was tempted to grin, or to comment on the ridiculousness of a woman with perfect memory carrying notes, but she bit the inside pocket of her cheek and nodded. She knew the notes were something of a ploy - Winter was apparently too unobtrusive for anyone on the council to suspect her resourcefulness. _Never underestimate intelligence agents_, Han's voice swept through her head. _They're the ones who'll shoot you before you even know they're there._

"The Coruscant committee is performing well. There are over seventeen crisis agencies working together to clear sector three, between levels three hundred and six hundred. Droids are still being renovated for the job, so it's just human workers and therefore slow work. They'll proceed southward from there, clearing sectors six and twelve next, then loop back towards the senate building to cover five and two."

"Only at the three to six hundred levels?"

"Yes, Your Highness," Winter grimaced. "No word on the two hundred and lower levels."

_That should surprise me_ was her fleeting thought. "Anything else?"

"Sure." Winter sagged a bit into her chair, enough for Leia to see. "But it's all fairly monotonous and I can catch you up later when you have a desire to be bored to death."

Leia took in her aide's narrowed eyes and was instantly suspicious; Winter was seldom dismissive about work. A tiny part of her mind buzzed as if inflamed, like adrenaline had been shot directly into her neck. "What's the unofficial news, then?"

Winter remained in her chair, but Leia could tell all business was forgotten, the charade of the helpful diplomatic aide tossed casually aside. As Leia watched, a slow, intimate grin appeared on her oldest friend's face. "I may or may not have news about Solo Fleet."

She didn't let it show, but the adrenaline seemed to double instantly. "By your face, I'm anticipating _fantastic_ news."

"For you and me, both."

The tone of Winter's voice and her uncharacteristically lazy smile told Leia all she needed to know. "When?"

"Oh, well, officially the schedule hasn't changed. But word has it they're nearly done with the cleanup and ETA to Coruscant is three days."

Leia was careful to keep her face composed, but was fluttering on her adrenaline high. Of course the information was good. There was no doubt _where_ Winter had procured it, and Tycho rarely gave them news that wasn't determined, if unannounced, fact, sent directly from General Solo. Tycho sent news to Winter - and, by extension, his superior officer's fiancée - because he didn't have to be seen as often as the general and was sneaky enough to get away with it when Han wouldn't, and couldn't, be able to.

Han would be back in three days, then. With the cleanup of Zsinj's territory obviously completed and the fleet's first return since that great victory over the most famous of the Imperial warlords, she suspected something of a media cyclone to hit - and therefore a rush of Outer Rim senatorial candidates to pose and claim unity with the navy. It would all have to be timed carefully to take advantage of the media highlights and prevent any Intel spillage.

Her week suddenly seemed much too full - and much more interesting, too.

"Threepio, could you please bring up my schedule for the week?" She sneaked a quick glance at Winter, who was calmly packing up her notepad with a give-away smirk plastered on her face. "Let's see what we can reschedule."

* * *

General Han Solo wanted nothing more than to get off the goddamned ship and away from anyone that expected him to order them around.

Unfortunately, his luck was running dry.

Before him floated the remnants of a half-repaired fleet, mechanics in EV suits buzzing around the shells of old capital ships and starfighters limping their way back to unpressurized docking bays. The hull of the largest capital ship had been breached two days ago by a proton torpedo with barely enough momentum to break through the durasteel it was made of. The ship had been rendered ineffective with the same series of events that had been conquering large warcraft for ages: failing defensive shields, an overly-proud captain, and then vacuum screaming into a space that had one minute before been alive and frantic and was now dead and imploded.

He shook his head.

Zsinj would've been unimpressed with what the remnants of his fleet had offered against Han's cleanup effort. The battle here had been just shy of pathetic, the enemy fleet uncoordinated, out-commanded and massively overpowered. It registered as a great defeat in the historical annals, he'd been told, but even then it had felt like widespread slaughter. Now it felt wrong and overdone and just a bit overwhelming.

He turned to his communications officer, one Flie Preos. "Ensign, have they surrendered?"

"No, sir." Preos didn't have to look down at his screen; he'd been waiting for the sublight transmission for hours now. "We got a notice that it was going to come earlier today, but no word."

"Figures," Han said. "What about the _Iron Fist_?"

The ensign gestured past the viewport to the hulk of metal nearest them. It was caught in a lazy counterclockwise roll, one engine burnt out and the other exhausting itself trying to pull it out of the rotations. "Your guess is as good as mine, sir."

"I don't like my guesses." _Iron Fist_ was supposed to be refitted and rehabilitated into regular use, but by the look of its exterior paneling, it wouldn't be happening any time soon. "When is our relief coming?"

"On their way, sir." The ensign looked up. "Command just sent notice."

Han scrubbed his eyes and exhaled as loud as he thought he could without letting on how tired he was. He walked over the communications monitor, leaned down to read the screen.

_Upon docking, all commissioned officers above the rank of commander to be presented at a gathering in honor of Zsinj's elimination. Gathering to commence at 2200 at main reception hall, Imperial Palace._

"Fuck," he whispered.

"Yes, sir," the communications officer replied, a grin belying the serious tone of his voice. "Permission to distribute the message to all commissioned officers ranked commander and up?"

"Tag on a note about dress uniforms," he rolled his eyes, "because I know Perrik won't wear one unless he's ordered to."

"Yes, sir."

Han brushed past the comm officer and meandered through the bridge until he was satisfied things were looking somewhat to spec, and then left his XO in charge and looped back to his quarters. They weren't far, but the corridors seemed to tack on time that he had both too much and not enough of. Against the military code he'd sworn to uphold - and every military code he'd privately sworn to disobey - he loosened his shirt collar and started unbuttoning it before he even reached his deck, gingerly testing his right shoulder and rolling his neck. He'd bruised it in the last of Zsinj's death throes, slammed into the nav station during an evasive maneuver that he himself had ordered. He had been hoping the bruising would calm down before Leia had a chance to see it, but with just two days until they docked, he was fairly certain she would notice _something_.

He palmed open the hatch to his quarters, did a quick mental check that everything was accounted for and where he had left it, then dropped onto his bunk. It'd been a long time since he'd felt energized. It was the normal seasoned-soldier routine, but it was draining and he hated feeling incompetent, even though everyone was commending his work and success.

He blew out his breath at the thought.

What he had done was use skills and instincts he'd picked up on the end of Imperial patrols, within their blaster sights and screwing with fate as much as anything. It wasn't half-hearted genius that had destroyed Zsinj. It was simple logistics. He'd been the right man for the job and he'd had the right people with him to do it.

They'd been at it, almost constantly, for two _years_.

Two years was a long time to rely on half-buried instincts and sharp personnel, because instincts maxed out and personnel had a nasty habit of dying when things got tough. And every day the only constant was really the thought that _Damn it, we're still here_. It resounded everywhere, from his bunk to the lowliest ensign on refresher duty. _We're still here. We're still fighting and we're still far away and we're still dying._

You couldn't argue with that logic, he thought, as he felt the slipcover of his bunk on his hands. He'd sat down without realizing it. If he was this tired, they all were, and it was time for them to be relieved.

But hadn't he just received that message two days ago?

After the last assault on _Iron Fist_, the fight against Zsinj had been completed and the fleet ordered home. They had been waiting to investigate the warlord's death, to make sure that their target had been destroyed on the bridge with the same massive suffocation the rest of the crew had suffered, and to receive the official surrender. They'd found a mess of pressurized remains crammed in the lockers off the main bridge, dressed in the lackadaisical whites of an inflated Imperial warlord, and had waited until the genetic tests had confirmed what they all knew by looking at the compressed shell of a human shoved in the locker bay.

It wasn't until then – and only then – that Han started to think about returning to Coruscant.

Against every instinct he had, his heartbeat picked up at the thought. He rolled his eyes. It'd been almost six months since his last leave. It felt much, much longer than that.

He picked up his personal datapad and scrolled to the bottom of the long list of messages until he glanced at the third-to-last message, from Airen Cracken's office. He often received messages from NRI - statistics and warnings and Intel packages - and he generally deleted them without reading the whole message. Deciding he simply didn't care to know, and figuring if it had been anything important they would have scrambled it - he scrapped the message and shut down the datapad, closing his eyes as he did. He had the presence of mind to set his alarm and then fell asleep, the thoughts he didn't allow himself during the day coming up to the forefront and chasing him into a black oblivion he knew all too well.

* * *

It was a minor item and one of four meetings she was not able to reschedule. The other three all pertained to the Coruscant cleanup effort where time was of the essence and rescheduling would have cost lives. She'd managed to delegate enough time to meet with the committees and settle their serious, but hardly difficult-to-solve, problems.

This meeting, though, seemed to be like the myriad of other appointments that were not time-sensitive, yet Threepio had been unable to reschedule it. When it failed to disappear from her schedule this morning, Leia had asked Threepio about it, only to hear from him that General Airen Cracken had no intention of dismissing the meeting and was looking forward to seeing her this afternoon.

It was an unbearable ending to an already unbearable day.

"Madame Minister, I'm sorry to keep you waiting," the general entered his office. He brushed a hand across his cropped salt-and-rust hair, smoothed his wrinkled face with a weary expression. "We, like you, are planning some additional security for the fleet's arrival tonight."

She nodded, wondering if perhaps _this _was the reason for the appointment. It struck her then that the official report of the fleet's arrival had only arrived yesterday, and this meeting had apparently been scheduled over a month before. "Of course. I would ask that you refrain from using that title, though."

The general sat behind the desk and propped his elbows on the polished wood. "You do not anticipate the position?"

Leia chose her words carefully. "Once the Senate is elected, and if Madame Chief of State approves, I would be pleased to assume it." She smiled gracefully, trying to ignore how her stomach clenched at the thought. "But it's too soon to start using it."

Cracken's eyes sparkled, pleased with her response. "Probably wise. If you don't mind, what is your title at the moment?"

"I have no official title in the New Republic, other than a member of the Provisional Council, of course."

"And you won't accept any until you're a confirmed diplomat?"

An annoyed flare went through her body; surely he had more on his mind that her position in their new government. "I won't accept any title until I've been elected or appointed as such," she corrected. "Excuse me, General, but is there a point to your prodding?"

It was a rude comment to make, but she wasn't feeling particularly generous at the moment; as he himself had said, she wasn't a confirmed staff diplomat. She was surprised when he chuckled. "That's up to you. I can offer you a rank and position in New Republic Intelligence."

It took her a moment to process his words, another twenty seconds to be completely sure she heard him correctly. "Well," she stood up and turned towards his office door, "if that's all -"

"Sit down, Princess." His voice took on the quality of sun-warmed sand, thick and grainy and full of heat. "You are being officially recruited to a major Republic agency."

Underlying his words, she felt the anger of a man who was not used to being rejected.

"General," she said, "It is my impression that I can choose whether or not to be recruited into any major republic agency."

"Of course. But at this very moment I outrank you, and you spend enough time with military officers to know what rank can do for someone."

The dig to her affiliation with a particular naval officer didn't rankle her - she was used to it - but his mistaken expectation that it would gave her a moment to clear her head. She sat down, willing him to continue quickly so that she could leave.

"You have been uniquely trained to handle difficult situations, Princess. I don't believe you know how broad your skill set is." He shifted his arm with a grimace to turn on the datapad that lay by his right hand. "Your history is proof enough of how valuable you could be."

He twisted the datapad to face her, and she leaned in despite herself. Her name and Imperial docket picture stared back at her, underlined and bulleted underneath with certifications and experiences that she was prepared to put behind her. _Hand-to-hand combat instruction by Giles Durane; intergalactic flight certification; confirmed aptitude for naval command and tactics; knowledge of and experience in guerilla-style warfare involving small- to large-scale assault groups..._

She cleared her throat. "General, this dossier belongs to a different life."

"I've learned two things about diplomats in my time here," he said, with a layer of anger beneath it belying the introspective nature of the non-sequiter. "One is that they feel the need to unnecessarily compartmentalize their lives. Are you under the impression that you function as a politician outside of how you function as a private citizen?" His mouth quirked up in a grin that only reminded her of Han's in the sense of worry that washed through her. "Outside of your past experiences? Outside of the company you keep?"

Another dig. She bit her tongue.

"The second thing I've learned is that politicians like you drive themselves crazy trying to make a difference from the top down." He swiveled the datapad toward himself and called up a second file, then pushed it towards her again. This time, a list of her proposals and amendments - as well as her voting record - from her time as an Imperial senator was shown. "Name one of these proposals that made it to the Emperor himself."

"The Imperial Senate was not a just system."

"The Imperial Senate was a representative body of beings. Perhaps not a stellar example of justice, it's true, but can you really tell me you aren't worried about the same thing playing out here?"

She couldn't. She'd already admitted that to herself. "General, what you're suggesting is ludicrous. I have no intention of joining the NRI."

"Ludicrousness aside," he nodded at her political record and ignored her protest, "the cold hard facts point to a fruitless career trying to make beings across the galaxy happy with how the government is functioning. Is that really what you signed up for?"

"If no one signed up for it, a government couldn't exist."

"I didn't say no one should do it. There are whole systems full of beings made for a life of political intrigue and power. The Bothans, for example, would kindly submit a delegate to take your place as expected Minister of State."

"Which is a good enough reason for me to stay where I am," she replied, standing up and pushing the datapad toward him. "General, if there's nothing else?"

Cracken seemed to relax into his seat, though his posture didn't change. "Think about it, Princess. When you decide that you're truly ready to make a difference, your commission is right here." He tapped the datapad and smiled easily, the wry grin so confident that she considered kneeing him in the groin just to remove it.

"Of course." She squared her shoulders and moved towards the door, hyperaware of his eyes on her back and his soft chuckle as the door slid shut behind her.

General Cracken was not a stupid man, she thought two hours later as she waited in a booth adjacent to the docking bay where the _Mon Remonda_ was berthed. The bay was a smaller version of the public one that normally housed fleet arrivals, and it was swarmed with mechanics and workers hooking up fuel lines and releasing hatch after hatch as military personnel busied around, lowering the ramp and entering the flagship to take reports from the crew. She started counting the deckhands to keep her mind busy.

It didn't work, so she again considered the strange offer from earlier.

Cracken wouldn't have made an offer like that out of the blue, she knew. He was a careful man, more convincing than Jan Dodonna but without Carlist's easy familiarity, and he operated the NRI in the streamlined manner that he had used during the war. There was more to this offer than met the eye.

She caught Winter's attention from across the booth, and realized from whom the suggestion had come. She quickly tucked the thought away - not because of its improbability, but because she would deal with it later. She waved Winter over, then turned to watch the docking procedures.

Winter came to her side, her hair fanning behind her. "Yes, Your Highness?"

"Where did they put the press?"

"The press and our senatorial visitors are _resting_ in the corridor outside." Winter moved a fraction closer and whispered, "Can't you hear the self-absorption from here?"

Leia smiled. Winter was used to operating as two very separate entities through her work during the war, so it simply stood to reason that she would excel as both Leia's diplomatic aide and, more covertly, her oldest friend and frequent second opinion. Leia was used to Winter slipping in and out of roles at will.

Winter straightened back up. "Major Plantik is the docking bay officer-on-call today. He offers to send General Solo to this booth once he is cleared to exit the _Mon Remonda_." Her eyes shifted behind Leia's shoulder, and Leia understood the warning. They were not alone here, and, as excited as she was to see Han, she wasn't willing to feed the gossip-mongers any more than she already did.

"That won't be necessary," she said. "We'll board the ship once it's cleared."

Winter leaned in again. "We'll board the ship?"

Leia ignored her and watched the deckhands' work, the ship almost completely secured. "Looks like they're done," she said, eyeing a group of fighter jockeys descending the ramp of the _Mon Remonda_, military-issue bags dragging behind them and eyes scanning the various transparisteel booths for family and friends. The booth she was in was a more exclusive one, reserved for ambassadors who came to pose next to their heroic constituents; a Sullustian and a human female from Commenor left the booth and went to greet the pilots.

When the flood waned, she nodded to Winter and they left the booth. The non-commissioned personnel and pilots had cleared out, though not everyone had left the ship. Leia had counted on Han's habit of staying behind until everyone else was gone ("I _hate_ being introduced," he'd told her once during a half-diplomatic, half-reconnoiter mission for the rebellion. "Being paraded around. If I'm being introduced, I _damn_ well be getting something out of it"). He also had a habit of giving his battle commanders and squadron leaders some time to themselves before they docked - and then kept them there to help check the ship before they handed it over to the mechanics.

They exchanged a few congratulatory hugs to some of the older members of Han's fleet - former Rogues and a few current ones, too - then made their way up the ramp. There were still plenty of personnel on the ship, checking filters and various communication feeds, but their uniforms were often unbuttoned and they radiated a sense of barely-contained impatience. Leia knew without checking insignias that these were the officers who would go straight from the _Mon Remonda_ to the celebratory dinner arranged for them.

They walked until they found Tycho Celchu, huddled over a piece of metal, tinkering with a multitool. He was outfitted in standard Starfighter Command-issued attire, though his jacket was wrapped around his waist and his boots scuffed up. His hair was just past regulation length, Leia thought, and considered pointing it out until she realized who was probably at fault for the lax style.

"Commander Celchu," she said, because Winter wouldn't do it first. He looked up blurrily, as if he had been completely focused on the multitool, and immediately stood up. He offered them a salute, but with it came a genuinely pleased expression on his face, and Leia felt gratified that the same charming Alderaani she had met just before the Battle of Endor retained his pride throughout the rough months since the Coruscant takeover.

"Your Highness, Winter," he nodded to them both, then the grin widened. "Much as I'm flattered to see _both_ of you, I suspect one of you is off to welcome someone else home."

Leia laughed as he came forward and hugged her. "Maybe." She released him, patted his cheek. "It depends on how bad of a mood he's in."

Tycho nodded, moved over to Winter's side, grabbed her hand. "Bad enough. It might have been better to spring the dinner on him this morning. Save us two days of cursing and insults."

"I'll remember that," she said as Winter lightly hit him on the shoulder. "I think I'll go hunt down the happy general, if you don't mind. Commander." She nodded to Winter. "And, thanks. I'll see you at the dinner, yes?"

Winter responded to the affirmative, but Tycho simply nodded, as enthusiastic a grin as she'd ever seen growing on his face as he turned and pulled Winter closer. Leia chuckled under her breath as she turned away, ready to go and leave them alone. Tycho had loosened up from the straight-laced man that had pursued Winter - he had grown more comfortable in his skin, more confident with taking command. _And he's obviously grown used to taking orders from a general that isn't particularly keen on military discipline._

It didn't surprise her, and it did. Han's style of management seemed to operate on the assumption that he had earned the respect of his crew without totally earning the respect of his superiors. That was how she interpreted it, at least. She knew he was careful about rules - ignoring a few to keep many others in line - and _that_ was what surprised her. That he strategized his method of command, that he thought it out.

She wasn't sure if it was a side of him that she hadn't witnessed before or if it was a reflection of a newer, more responsible man. The thought of an utterly responsible Han Solo was enough to make her laugh; as much as she loved the thought of her fiancée as a successful general, a man who had earned respectability through his experience and his leadership abilities, she _wanted_ the man she had known in the rebellion - the drifter, the wild card.

The corridors were the same soft blue-gray as all Mon Cal interiors, an organic design that seemed both peaceful and slightly unpleasant. She assumed Han would be at the bridge, directing the general clean-up and trying to forestall the inevitable dinner. She passed the mess, where various droids were tearing down tables and booths, then a row of barracks, then moved towards the bridge. She passed an open hatch that led to the officer's lounge and stopped as she spotted General Han Solo of New Republic Fleet Command, sitting at a table at the far corner of the room with his back to her.

His table was completely covered with printed-out sheets of flimsy, and three datapads were scattered on top of the piles. His head was in his right hand as his left flipped through the nearest stack, and Leia took a cursory look around the room. Hobbie Klivian sat at the make-shift sabaac table, nursing his second bottle of ale, and two women stood closer to the hatch, eyeing her carefully.

One of the women, a blonde, called out. "General Solo, sir."

He didn't look up or miss a beat as he tapped the datapad. "Yes, Major Felps?" His voice spread across Leia's chest like heat in a snowstorm and she fought to keep her face blank.

"Sir, if the cleanup is complete, can the nav display be downloaded into the navy specs?"

His head came up and the tapping stopped, but his back remained toward the hatch. "You saving me work?"

Felps continued to watch Leia's reaction, a ghost of a smile tucked into the way she pursed her lips. "Is that a problem, sir?"

"You know damn well you can do my job anytime you want to, Major," he said, and Leia couldn't help smiling now, her face giving her away as Hobbie looked up and nodded at her from the other side of the room. "Feel free to promote yourself while you're down there and go to the dinner for me."

The blonde smiled outright now, winking slowly at Leia as Hobbie started collecting his bottles. "Think the princess'll notice?"

"I don't know," he resumed tapping on the datapad. "Whaddya think, Highness?"

She rolled her eyes, too captivated to be truly angry at his ploy as he turned in his seat and grinned at her . "Perhaps Major Felps would look better in uniform?" She smiled as she said it.

He remained lounged in his chair. Leia took in his completely blank face and then his right fist, which was clenched by his side, and decided that she must know him better than either she, or he, realized, because his sabaac face was telling her he wanted the rest of his crew out of the room now. Hobbie was standing, walking towards her, as he answered her inquiry. "Felps _always _looks good," he said. "But I'd take the one with the higher rank. Your Highness." He bowed his head and brushed past her, swigging from the full bottle as he went by.

"And that's my cue," Felps moved toward the hatch as well, dragging the other woman with her. "Sir, I really am going to download the feed. I'll start the prelim analysis, too, if you'd like."

"Of course I'd like. Close the hatch when you leave, too."

Leia was already walking towards him when the door sealed, the hiss of air a faint sound in the background. "Felps is helpful."

"Uh huh," he teased. "Hell of a kisser, too."

"My." It took eight steps to get to him; she used her ninth to turn and sit on the edge of the table, pushing back flimsies as she crossed her legs and stared down at him, failing miserably in her attempt to look unexcited; he failed to look disinterested. At least one thing in the universe hadn't changed. "I'll take that into consideration."

There was a shadow on his face for a brief second, and then it was gone, and he was reaching for the fabric of her dress, resting his palm against her leg. He stood up, slid his hand from her ankle to mid-calf, then stopped and grabbed her hand where it rested on the table in front of him. "You look younger than I remember."

It was a confusing thing to hear, not expected, not romantic, not _more beautiful_ or _better_, but _younger._ She wondered if it was like the way he _looked_ more responsible, though his hair - like Tycho's - was past regulation length and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. "I missed you."

He was at her mouth before she even knew what was happening, pressing his lips to hers in the few seconds it had taken him to move up against her. She was standing, too, and his tongue was making it difficult to remember if she'd done that herself or if he was holding her up. She couldn't feel her hands, and she was tempted to open her eyes to check that they were still there.

He kissed her for a few seconds, then pushed her back inches, one hand still behind her neck, the other on the side of her head. He must have realized, as she had, that their time was running out. The dinner was less than two hours away. "Did you bring your clothes with you?"

She shook her head. "No." She smiled at him. "It's a nice try, though."

"I'd try to get out of this if I thought I'd have any luck."

"You wouldn't." She threaded her arm around his, pulled him toward the hatch, then stepped back. "_After_."

He grimaced. _After_ was a nebulous promise after two, three hours of diplomatic stupidity, and she knew it. He didn't say that. "I'm going to hate this."

Leia moved her hand to the back of his head, stood on her toes and kissed him softly. "Yes," she said, her lips just a breath away from his. "You will."

* * *

He was pushing her towards the bed before his brain even registered that the doors to their quarters had shut, that there were no lights on, that Leia was breathing shallower than he remembered. He broke their kiss to grab the bag she held, then kissed her again as he dropped it to the floor, kicking aside the shoes she'd discarded as her tongue brushed against his. Her hand was knotted in his hair and her mouth was sweeter than the wine at the reception and the only word he could think of was _finally_.

She broke away to settle herself on their bed and he followed, pushing at her dress until it was a flash of color on the far side of the room.

Nothing about the way they were moving together was restrained or soft, and yet it seemed like a purer expression of homecoming than the past three hours had been. He was releasing endless hours of frustration, of half-memories, into her body, and he imagined she understood - and reciprocated it.

When the pressure was too much to stand, he closed his eyes and concentrated on her warmth, of her sighs and her breathing, and felt for the millionth time since his return how much he had truly missed her. He ran a hand down her thigh, felt her shudder and murmur his name, and it simply became too easy to give up, to let his physical release flood the wordless sentiments away. She answered by wrapping her legs and arms tighter around him, her body an easy escape as she cried out and tensed around him mercilessly.

The first sound he heard once he collected himself was of her still-harsh breaths, and they reassured him. He moved to his side and shifted her to his chest, her braid intact but frazzled, her face nestled into his throat. He felt her press a kiss to his collarbone and sigh, eyelashes fluttering against his skin, as she murmured, "Welcome home."

Han's last thought before he fell asleep, Leia clutched in his arms, the cool air of their bedroom whispering across his skin, was that it wouldn't have been a homecoming if she hadn't been there.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thank you, to those that reviewed! Enjoy part 2!

* * *

Their morning was too _rushed._ Han Solo wasn't the type of man to lounge around and do nothing, but he wasn't so twitchy that he couldn't enjoy a good fifteen post-coital minutes wrapped up with Leia in their green thermasilk sheets. Things _weren't_ as carefree as that; there'd been some under-the-radar politicking going on at the fleet's reception dinner, and Leia was absolutely determined to hammer it all out before too much time had passed for damage control.

Han wasn't one hundred percent sure what damage needed to be controlled. Then again, he didn't particularly care, so he rolled onto his back and fiddled with Leia's braid as it snaked down her shoulder.

What he most wanted to do was make a _damn_ decision about the wedding. It occurred to him to care about that discussion every once in a while, when he thought things might be easier on the logistical end if they just got it over with. At this point, their wedding was an amorphous event that really only mattered to ithem/i, the ones that took their potshots when he wasn't around. He suspected that the reason Leia _hadn't_ married him immediately after they'd first had this discussion had been her fear that he would eventually change his mind. Since he'd stuck around, she'd agreed to do it _someday_, and it then _someday_ had turned into a definitive _yes_ the morning he had left for the Zsinj campaign. They were at a more convincing standstill, one that gave them a definition for their relationship (one word, _engaged_, instead of _intending-to-marry-but-wasting-time-and-isn't-it-a-damn-shame?,_ which was the more popular sentiment), but it was a standstill nonetheless.

It struck him as odd that he felt the need to obsess over this _now_, when there was no definitive reason that he should. Now – when he was home and she was grounded here on Coruscant until after the senatorial elections had taken place – would be a ridiculous time to worry about this. Marriage should be one of those things that happened because it was time, not because they had the time to do it.

It was, however, becoming glaringly obvious to him that their wedding would have absolutely nothing to do with _them_ and everything to do with either the Jedi or the House Organa, and he was certain she had realized that long before he had. "I'm not going to get married because someone tells me I _have_ to," Leia had said. "That's not what it's about. The minute we can do this and have it be about _us_ is the minute I'll start planning it."

Which was fine. The fact of the matter, though, was that it had been almost an entire year since they'd last talked about it. In his experience, the things you avoided were the things that snuck up and shot you later on. They already lived together, and slept together, and were seen together in public whenever they happened to be in the same place at the same time. The custom was similar enough on both Corellia and Alderaan. The only difference between their lives now and their lives _after_ would be a small ring - an Organa addition to the deal - and he'd given that to her long ago.

"So," he said, grabbing her wrist, turning and kissing it where two blue veins intersected. "how long can I keep you here?"

"Not very," she mumbled, head on his chest. "I'm worried about Fondor."

"Fondor's a nice big planet that can take care of itself."

She reached over him to grab the water glass she kept on the drawers on her side of the bed. "Let me clarify. I'm worried about Tiny."

Tiny was a longstanding joke, referring to Tib Timmons, the biggest voice for Fondor loyalty to the New Republic. Fondor, as a planet, was a hard sell for even the biggest champion of Imperial assimilation, and Timmons' fragile voice crying out for unification was impetus enough for the nickname. His small stature had made it absolutely necessary.

Despite Tiny's protests, the Fondor issue was a big one. Fondor's loyalty wasn't really in question, but it _was_ one stone's-throw away from Teradoc, the newest in the long line of Imperial warlords; with Zsinj taken out of the picture at Selaggis, Teradoc stood free to grab whatever territory he could while the getting was good. The warlord hailed from Fondor itself; Han and Leia agreed that there was definite reason to worry about the shipyards, the third largest in the galaxy.

The major shipyards were _always_ a source of worry. Fondor, Kaut, Corellia, Sluis Van … all of them were hot spots for anyone in a position to look at the New Republic tactically.

The reoccurring problem, though, was their individual definition of 'worry'.

"Tiny's looking for a campaign crutch, you know that," he said, as he rolled to his side and pulled her against him. As an afterthought, he added, "Most of them are."

"Exactly. Mon Mothma and I are the only politicians at the moment that can work out the kinks. We're the only ones who aren't singularly allied with a large system."

"She's not representing Chandrila?"

"No. Her appointment to Chief of State has to come out of the Senate, but she can't be a member of it."

He rolled his eyes, but she couldn't see it. "I _think_," he said, because he knew that when he used those words she felt obligated to hear him out, whether she wanted to or not. "I think there's not a whole hell of a lot you can do from a council chamber. And if you go and get the military all riled up about it, you know who they're going to send. And I don't want to go."

Her eyebrows crept together like they did when she was about to laugh. "You can't be deployed for another three months. What makes you so sure they'd send _you?"_

"General's intuition." He noted that she hadn't commented on his crack about the council, then briefly wondered how long it would take her to realize that the sheet was being pulled from her. He'd been tugging on it for a good minute already. "If I leave now, I'm afraid I'll get a message telling me to bail you out because you hit someone."

She made a _hmm_ sound that distracted him and brought to mind her ragged breathing of the night before, then turned her head and smiled at him. "We will get married someday." She emphasized the _will_ like it was the main point of her sentence, and he briefly wondered why he didn't trust that it was. "And hitting someone for insulting me isn't in my best interest right now."

"Since when?"

"Since no one really cares all that much about us. They just want to abuse someone."

That was mostly true and also not true in the slightest. There were plenty of people that cared about the last Organa royal. They simply weren't the ones she wanted to hit.

She took a quick breath and sat up. "I'm going. I'm going to go and do important things in my office and you are not allowed in." She rolled out of the bed and mock-glared at him. "That is absolutely an order."

He raised an eyebrow, gestured to the door as mockingly as she had glared. "Wouldn't dream of disobeying." He waited until she left the room, entered the fresher, began the sonic-cycle. then rolled to his side and sighed. "Son of a bitch," he said, and thought _We'll talk about it later._

* * *

Leia Organa was dreaming about a memory and that's why she was fifteen years old. She found herself sitting in a tapcafe, her plainclothes bodyguard behind her, datapads littering the table and stacks of flimsy with her handwriting on them keeping her place in old folders of voting records. The information on her research datapad scrolled down, but her eyes didn't focus on the words. It was difficult to pay attention to them in the first place; many of the entries were in Nubian script - flowery even by Alderaanian standards - and she kept getting distracted by the _other_ essay she had to write, the one with the infinitely more appetizing title of "Killik Depiction in Natural-Mode Art" already typed into the datapad on her right.

But, no. If she didn't finish the political essay first, she'd never get through it. Better to get rid of the trouble you knew than whatever punishment may come later from neglecting it.

It was an awfully adult way to think about it, she thought to herself, but that didn't make her feel any better.

She sighed and refocused on the Nubian text. Scattered here and there were names she knew well: Palpatine, Padme Amidala, the assassinated Apailana, Pooja Naberrie. They were acquaintances of her father's: in her head she called them the 'notables'. People he talked about - the first three due to events before her birth and the last because, as a former ruler's niece, she had successfully navigated a campaign that her father believed Leia herself might face. Warnings, she thought. People to imitate - or not - and to learn from.

The truth was that politics was mind-numbingly boring unless there were _faces _to the theories. Most of Naboo's 'notables' worked with their constituents' opinions and beliefs; Naboo had had a run of trustworthy candidates for a period of time. It wasn't that they were stellar examples of politics. They were conscientious leaders. That must be the intended lesson, Leia thought.

She glanced at the art essay on the other datapad. The Killiks operated on the same sort of level. Warfare and life linked leaders to the masses. The hive mind made it nearly impossible for a "leader" to be chosen at all; a leader therefore represented the hive unconsciously. When they were depicted, they were moving as one colony, no matter how many bodies were displayed. Common opinion, common mind, common belief.

_If only,_ she thought, rolling her eyes. She was young, she admitted, but she wasn't stupid. Politics didn't work that way.

"Jheng," she said to her bodyguard. "Raal doesn't have to do these essays, does he?"

"Mr. Panteer is not the heir-apparent, Your Highness."

She was itired/i of that excuse. "Does Winter?"

"Princess, I don't _know_ what Lady Winter has to do. It is none of my business."

"But wouldn't you want to know? This is torture. You are an eyewitness to unspeakable wrongs being done to a member of the House Organa." She blew her hair out of her eyes. "If Winter has to do it, I'll go quietly."

Jheng was an okay guy by most standards - his family had served Alderaan's throne for years - but he had no sense of loyalty to _her_, Only to her father. "I imagine you'll go quietly regardless," he said, a slight smile on his lips.

"I'll go quietly if we go to the Panteers'."

"Princess." He said it in his _no-way-are-you-getting-away-with-this_ voice, and Leia lost all hope. "We are not going to the Panteers' today. Finish the assignment and we can consider it tomorrow."

She rolled her eyes again and slouched as low as she could. It was as unfair as it could possibly get. No one _else_ at the university had a bulky, armed-to-the-teeth man as their study-mate, a man that was determined to make her into a thirty-three year old political genius before she could even obtain her interstellar piloting license. She turned towards the datapad again and started working on a functional thesis, hammering out political theory and historical perspective until she couldn't bear to sit it out anymore. The words bled together, and she was sure she'd mistyped a few Corellian legal terms out of sheer boredom and laziness.

_Politics got things done_, she told herself. _Politics changed the galaxy_. She was studying because she wanted to change it for the good, because she agreed with her father on too many things not to go down his path. The things she _liked_ doing didn't accomplish much for the general good. Art and running around the palace grounds, climbing trees, sneaking out at night - that didn't solve problems. To be honest, they caused a lot more problems than they solved.

If she wanted to do what her father feared he wouldn't be able to do in his lifetime, she was better off doing what Jheng was making her do.

When the blur looked to meet the length requirements, Leia straightened up and glared at Jheng as he grabbed the datapad and began to read it. He typed in a few corrections, muttered to himself a few times, asked her questions about the finer points of her theory. She tried very hard to appear interested in what he was saying, but all she could really think of was that she _hated_ her overly-educated planet, where bodyguards could adequately criticize political theory.

She heard a soft _ping_ and immediately awoke to the feel of half-hearted acceptance on her lips, regret and pain etched into the very bedclothes that brushed her skin. Going back to sleep was always a challenge when she dreamed of Alderaan. She crept closer to Han, and imagined that today's frequent use of the word 'home' must have triggered it. Simple overuse of a not-so-simple word.

She sighed and tried to force her shoulders to relax.

* * *

Airen Cracken returned to his desk in a spell of pent-up hostility.

He didn't trust himself to handle his anger, so when a politician – or just the thought of bureaucracy – bothered him, he crept back to the relatively safe ground of his office, where everything was about expedition and resolution. His whole life revolved around solving problems before anyone even knew there was anything to worry about. He'd been told, years ago, that that's what Intelligence operatives do; they perform the dirtiest tasks and don't even bother to share it with anyone else.

Old adages worked well sometimes: the less they knew, the better off they'd be.

He checked his dailies, heard reports from his senior analyst on Fondor, then cosied up to his newest feed from Sluis Van. The analyst on Fondor reported no significant changes. But the Sluis Van report had him tense again, tingles of stress running blockade attacks against his shoulder blades.

_So_, he thought, unhappy with the epiphany. _It's Sluis Van._

He brought a hand to his temple, aware that he was about to do some enormous manipulative work, and that that kind of sleuthing always induced a migraine equal to any he'd had as a junior officer partying in the Imperial Navy.

He called up a few rosters, triggered a few prep agents and prepared to become a hated son of a bitch. Again.

* * *

The alarm went off in the middle of the night, which even Leia had to admit was relative on a planet that supported such a large illegal underground. Still, the attackers could have had a little more sympathy, if not for her, than for anyone who was trying to work out both a professional and private life in the upper echelons of the New Republic.

She didn't remember waking or dressing, but when her brain caught up with her body she was racing to the Provisional Council quarters as quickly as she could, Han tagging at her heels, and both of them were fully dressed. _A step in the right direction_, she thought as she hurried into the room.

The bright lights of the makeshift communications alcove were spaced irregularly, providing large pockets of darkness between fluorescent spaces of activity. A part of her laughed at the utter ridiculousness of moving the most advanced comm equipment available in the galaxy to where light was provided, but she shoved it off and turned to a large screen on the opposite edge of the room.

"Who are we looking at?" she asked.

"It's a coalition," Admiral Ackbar said from across the room, dressed in his Navy whites. "Zsinj leftovers, by the pattern of the fighter groups."

"If they're Zsinj-trained forces, they've lost some discipline," Han said, still at her side. He moved to the screen, holding up an index finger. "Look at the arrangement of flights. Two groups per seven enemy fighters, and they've left a lane through the center toward one of their capital ships."

"I never said they were Zsinj-trained, General Solo," the admiral said. "Only that they were leftovers."

Leia pressed her thumbs against the holoprojector table across from Ackbar. "Mercenary?"

No one answered her, though it was obvious they agreed. She watched as preliminary enemy tallies were made, though the fleet above their heads hardly qualified as a fleet at all. Three capital ships - two decrepit Star Destroyers and a lighter, faster Corellian gunship - with a normal regiment of fighters made up something like fifteen percent of the New Republic Navy currently stationed on or near Coruscant. It wasn't enough to really warrant the klaxons blazing in the palace.

_What are you after?_ she thought to the ships above them, but she kept quiet as she listened to Ackbar's commands. The _Infinity_ was already on vector toward the enemy, and he was sending five other ships to circle the small group. _Overkill is still a kill,_ Giles Durane had told her once, in another lifetime, before the knowledge had ever been put to use. _Get it done quick and fast and you won't have to worry about it again later._

"No word from them?" Han asked, obviously wondering about motives, too.

Ackbar kept his eyes on the projector screen, but his voice carried across the room. "No demands," he blinked. "Do you recognize any of the ships?"

"Can't tell. Not from this range, at least." Han looked over at her, and she almost said no right then and there, because she knew what he was going to offer before he did; she had no actual sway over what he did during a matter of planet security, no matter how benign the threat might be. "You want a positive ID?"

"Yes," Ackbar said. "Take the _Falcon_, though. I don't want another capital ship out there confusing everyone else."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Han said, tossing a two-fingered salute to the Mon Calamari. His eyes ran assurances by her, like he had a list of them prepared for just this sort of thing. _I'll stay away from the hot spots_ and _I'll be back before you miss me_ and _This is nothing to worry about._ But the very idea that these were stock comments - that he'd thought them through already - only made her more conscious of the danger he could be in.

She pushed away the maudlin (and possessive) thought and nodded, trying to focus on the battle epicenter and reaching for a communications headset. If he was going out - even to scout the ships - she wanted to hear what he was saying. Before she could put them on, he grabbed her bicep, leaned in, and whispered _love you_ before he jogged out of the alcove, leaving her determined to help him out as much as she could, short of jumping in front of Chewie and stealing the copilot's chair.

It wasn't a battle so much as a massacre. Ackbar was a calm battle commander and completely in control of the situation. She really had no need to double-check his orders, but she silently did it anyway. He'd committed six capital ships, which was more than enough to smooth over the attacking group, and the NR Navy was much better trained and commanded than its enemies. Ackbar's group made short work of it, like war games, passing and firing and taking little damage in return.

They were operating under the impression that not only was this a small group of mercenaries loosely allied with Zsinj's decimated fleet, but that it was some sort of distraction or feint to keep Coruscant's eye off another target. Leia served as an impromptu communications officer for Ackbar as his personal staff was down in the wardroom. She found herself prioritizing information feeds from member worlds, deployed fleets and the intelligence from the battle above.

Han's voice weaved in and out of her work, and she reserved a small part of her focus on his position and the Intel he was reporting. The bulk of her efforts made this a very difficult task, as word spread and she received more and more information. She would keep Han in the back of her mind, ready to act if she needed to, but he was _fine_ and she didn't need to worry about him.

Ackbar wanted prisoners, but, more than that, he wanted to be efficient. Two X-Wing squadrons and an A-Wing flight were engaging various scrapped-together craft, though 'engaging' was little more than a blatant euphemism. The NR capital ships were decimating the cobbled-together fleet, and little time passed before Blue Squadron had docked in one enemy Star Destroyer, effectively taking command from the inside out.

Leia waited until both enemy capital ships were secured, then stood up and tried to grab Ackbar's attention. "Admiral, there's some confusion on the holonet around Storinal. You should direct NRI on it immediately."

"Storinal?" The admiral's bulbous eyes turned towards her, ignoring the recommendation. "What's at Storinal?"

"Nothing." _Absolutely_ nothing. Nothing to warrant the amount of Intel congestion coming out of it, at least.

"Leia, can you narrow it down? Why are we being distracted from a tourist trap like Storinal?"

Leia nodded and got to work. The traffic coming out of the planet led to a ilack/i of information, which didn't bode well for her, because the one thing the post-Endor warlords seemed to get right was the chaos campaign. On a whim, she checked the naval postings and assignments, assuming very little of their fleet was stationed so far out. The list of names that popped up alarmed her, and she quickly checked the numbers. Just over 36,800 stationed on or around the planet.

_An Imperial-I Class Star Destroyer._

She felt a tickle at the back of her throat, and switched her databases, this time checking for any NR-commanded ships in the vicinity. The name that popped up on her screen confirmed the strange danger sense she'd felt, and brought with it a sense of impending heartache as she stood up and called for the Mon Calamari again.

"Sir, it's the _Rebel Dream_."

"She's stationed at Storinal?"

She nodded. "I've been trying to contact the captain, but the comm unit's dead. Either that or her frequency code has changed."

"Keep trying." He seemed to take a second to process the ship's name, then swung around again to face her. "It may not be what you think it is."

Leia didn't move. She regularly denied the fact that her heritage gave her an extra perception, an extraordinarily tempting sort of power. But when the feeling was this clear and the solid facts were elusive, it was hard to ignore. "Admiral, I think it's _exactly_ what I think it is."

_Rebel Dream_. Her flagship, diplomatic courier, and what had amounted to a home on those long months during the transition to Coruscant.

_Some things hurt far more than they should._

She made one last round of comm alerts, contacting the diplomatic envoys on Storinal, hearing reports of a battle above and tagged comm bursts that ended in the distinctive click of a frequency change. It was as clear as it needed to be. The ship had been captured by an unidentified patrol, and there was no clear report of her captain or crew. Though she filtered out the wild - and fictional - stories that get told (of frozen bodies spilling from the docking bays, or worse, partial frozen bodies burning up upon atmospheric entry), the mental images such stories inspired were difficult to ignore.

Leia was still conducting interviews with the diplomats when the door hissed open and that familiar form walked through the door, a Wookiee preceding him to Ackbar's chair. She wasn't sure what the admiral said, but Chewie was at her side while Han reported, his hand loosely locked onto her shoulder, and she had a feeling the Mon Cal had already initiated investigations into the Storinal case.

It took a moment for her to remember what time it was - how early - and that there was a long, hard day to be had tomorrow. She sighed and leaned into Chewie's giant hand, wishing, for a moment, she'd wake up as she usually did, with the nightmare behind her and the bright blue sky of a fictionalized Coruscant filtering through their windows.

She was almost completely certain Coruscant wasn't going to have good weather today, because she'd just heard that the weather controller had sustained minor damage in the light barrage.

It took everything she had to stand up and transfer her data to Ackbar, her hand a cold contrast to the air around the admiral. Then she turned and left the room, Ackbar, Chewie and the thought of blue skies behind her.

She _knew_ it was exactly what she thought it was.


	3. Chapter 3

Again, thank you for the feedback, those that are supplying. I (and my inner masochist) very much appreciate it!

* * *

Luke Skywalker's visits with his sister usually followed a very regulated formula.

Their initial greetings were always heartfelt and sweet, the warmth of their twin bond strengthened by their physical proximity. They always had too much to talk about and too little time to do it, and the rarity of their conversations made it impossible for them to stay on subject or even take in half of what they were supposed to be hearing.

It'd been four years since he'd discovered their relationship, and it'd taken four years to get to the point when it was easier to call her his sister than his friend or by her name. There was no guidebook on how to interact with long-lost siblings, so they just continued their always-more-than friendship as normal and every once in a while tried a tentative twin joke to see how the other reacted.

Sometimes he wondered if the transition would have been easier if he had been living on Coruscant when it was occurring, if they had been physically closer to each other. But Leia had had a lot to deal with anyway, and he wasn't completely sure that having him around would have helped anything at all. Endor had taken the center out of their world and they had had to recalibrate their individual settings to get back to normal, and he wasn't sure that he wouldn't have made the whole thing much harder for her than it had needed to be. In essence, their closest relationships had all changed on them. Where it used to be "Luke and Han and Leia", there was now "Han and Leia" and "Luke and Leia" and "Han and Luke" to worry about, and there was something inherently confusing about the way the three of them operated around and with each other nowadays.

Luke had accepted that he needed to see Leia as both a sister and a potential apprentice, and he was just getting the hang of the former enough to realize that he really should be pursuing the latter too. The thing was … he'd given her time to adjust to the sister change. She'd accepted him as her brother with absolutely no reservations. She seemed to be perfectly fine with him as a brother; it was her natural aversion to the Force that was off and out-of-whack and preventing her from accepting her biological family as such.

If he'd ever entertained the idea that becoming a Jedi made him more insightful when it came to his own species – or women, or his sister or anything in the blasted universe – he had been sadly deluding himself.

Things were different, but she just didn't seem ready to accept _all _of the differences.

He jumped at the sound of his name, and turned towards Leia as she moved closer to him him. "Hey, you," he said. "I was just thinking about you."

She smiled and hugged him. "Of course you were. What have I done now?"

He ignored her joke, steered her towards the public walkway. "I'm starving and you're taking me somewhere nice."

"Am I?" She laughed at him, but hooked her arm through his anyway. "I suppose I can manage that."

The next hour found them in an artistically expensive Ithorian tapcafe, Luke's plate empty and Leia still picking at hers, while she told him of an offer Airen Cracken had made to her not three weeks before. "It was the oddest thing in the world, Luke," she said, her fork in her hand as she explained. "He felt so convinced that I would agree to it."

"He's NRI. They assume everyone wants to be them." He was thinking of Iella Wessiri, Wedge's not-quite-for-sure-reciprocal-love-interest. "Every human kid I knew growing up wanted to be a spy."

"Every human _boy_ wanted to be a spy." She placed her fork on her plate, took a sip of water. "Human girls want a little more whimsy in their futures."

"Really?"

"Really." She leaned in closer, as if she were going to tell a secret, though she knew better than to say anything truly secret-worthy in a public place. "I haven't told Han yet."

That surprised him. "Afraid he'd forbid it?"

"Actually, I'm not sure he would. Part of me thinks he'd be all for it."

That _did_ make him laugh. "All for what? Getting yourself shot up on some backwater planet while doing surveillance work for Cracken?"

Leia laughed with him, then straightened up, her lips pursed together and her eyes narrowed slightly like she was trying to sound nonchalant but knew she'd never get away with it. "Did you hear about the _Rebel Dream_?"

He shook his head. He'd been searching around Dathomir for the _Chu'unthor_ the past month – after his resignation from SFC, he stopped receiving the military dailies. Something in his stomach dropped because when she spoke again, she had that hard, brave look on her face that didn't come close to fooling anyone who knew her as well as he did.

"Captured at Storinal. The _Peremptory_ got her."

"Oh." He didn't often feel like a farmboy; he hated the moments when he was forced back into the role. "Leia, I'm sorry. Is there any clear motive?"

"Besides gaining a ship in the process?" She laughed, but it sounded bitter. "No. We think the Coruscant attack last week was supposed to distract us from the area."

_Makes sense_. "Teradoc?"

"Ah. Well. That depends on who you ask." He knew there was more to be said, but she was paying the bill and standing up, encouraging him to take her elbow and start walking. "I don't think so. Ackbar disagrees – he thinks the forces that fought us up here were supposed to look like Zsinj forces, but it was crudely set up. I think we're overlooking the obvious."

"That they were ex-Zsinj."

"Right." They turned a corner and a breeze tumbled over their shoulders. "Teradoc doesn't have the manpower right now to support a two-front attack."

"What does Han think?" Surely the man had an opinion; with his experience, it was probably a valid one.

She sighed. "He's with Ackbar. Doesn't see the logistical similarities. Wants to jump to the most complicated possible assumption."

_Ah_, he thought. It was a given that Han and Leia would disagree about a great many things, though he wondered what made Leia take the opposite side if Han was the proven military expert on Zsinj. "He says – "

She hesitated. "Teradoc." She watched a Twilek pass in front of them about ten meters away, her lekku twitching as she sidled up to a human man on the other side of the walkway. "The Advisory Council's talking about sending a diplomatic envoy."

Luke took that in. He understood why certain members of the government would push for negotiations with Teradoc when they didn't offer any amnesty to Zsinj; he got that it all came down to the Fondor shipyards. What he was missing was why she obviously disagreed with it. Her feelings on the matter were fed into the way she spoke the words; on top of that, the Force nearly simmered with her anxiety.

He knew that she knew he could read her voice, and sighed. "Policy is important right now. We offer this to one illegal warlord, we end up offering it to his successor when he inevitably gets killed or deposed."

"Uh huh." He didn't believe her lie for a second. "And your Senate is …?"

"Young," she said, grabbing his hand. "Too inexperienced to see it all at face value. It's like babysitting a group of adolescents that hate each other."

"Hmm," he said, then chuckled. "I was never like that."

"Like what?" Her eyes belied the good-natured insult he knew was coming. His early life was an endless source of material. "You never speeder-dueled anyone on Tatooine for stealing your womprat territory?"

The image that sprang to mind made him laugh again, harder this time. "Biggs sometimes made me mad enough to spit. But no. What I meant was that I never had that much responsibility at a young age."

"Ah." They turned another corner, and Luke began recognizing the Senate housing district where she lived. It was flagrantly opulent, of course, but a stark contrast to the palace that overshadowed it. "Teradoc won't accept the offer anyway. It's not good public relations, it's not smart policy, and it's going to fail. Why try it then?"

"Yeah, okay. But why _else_ are you upset with the proposition?"

He knew he was one of about four souls in the entire galaxy that she had deemed trustworthy enough to answer direct questions like that. Still, the look she gave was unnerving and made him instantly regret asking it. "Guess who they're trying to send as commanding military escort?"

"Oh," he said, surprised and also not in the least bit surprised. Very few things made Leia as unsettled as things related to Han, his commission, or where he may be sent. "Oh."

"Yeah."

She stepped in front of him to enter a door and he realized, with a start, that they had arrived at her apartment building. He wasn't quite sure how they had managed to walk all the way through the Senate district in the time that they had said so little, but it didn't really matter and he needed to be a good brother and empathize. "But he just got back – "

"Less than two weeks ago. Tell me about it. There is apparently a law within the naval charter to rescind the three-month groundside rule, if it is deemed necessary for a certain officer to be deployed again."

"Well, okay." It made sense. In times of war, specific people might be needed for a mission right _then_; there wasn't time to wait three months while the officer in question got his or her groundside station out of the way. "But what about Carlist or Dodonna?"_ Or any of the other suitable officers who would be able to handle the assignment._ "Han's not the only commissioned officer around."

"Oh, Luke. It's so awful." She nodded to the security force guarding the inner vestibule. "They want the man that defeated Zsinj to be on hand. Like a massive psychological warfare campaign, though it has more to do with newly-elected senators getting free publicity and the 'supports the military' check-mark to their name as soon as they take office."

"Ugh," it was hard to hide his disgust. That wasn't why you signed your commission; that was why you stayed un-commissioned and dealt with the terrible pay. "I'm taking it Han isn't thrilled with the thought."

"He's absolutely livid, though I think it's more that he's hearing it from me rather than from Ackbar." She grimaced. "If it was a truly military decision, Ackbar would have ordered him to do it, no questions asked. He hasn't done that. Han feels like he has all the room in the world to protest and yell and cause a big mess."

Luke could imagine. "But he _will_ be ordered to soon, I'm guessing?"

"As soon as it's all formally written down and passed by the Council, yes." She sighed, slid an ID card through a slot and the doors to the lifts opened up as they stepped inside. "He'll have no choice. And, quite frankly, I don't think I could take that."

"Can you get yourself on the mission, then? I mean, you'd have a better chance of success with Teradoc than most of the Council."

"Maybe. Except I'm being pushed to work the Fondor angle. Mon Mothma wants me to meet with their delegation and assure them that we don't question their loyalty, that the shipyards will be protected against the same kind of harassment we saw at Storinal." She sighed and ran a hand over her hair. "On top of it all, most of the elections are taking place within the next few days. Once the elections are done, Mon Mothma will campaign for Chief of State, and she's already decided to nominate me for Minister of State – "

"Congratulations."

" – and that means a lot more traveling than I initially anticipated." The lift doors rose, and the hallway outside of Leia's quarters opened up. He preceded her through the hallway this time, though he hung back as she slid another ID through the security locks on the wall outside her door. "And I'm just not convinced that I want to worry about that right now."

"What _are_ you worrying about?"

"Honestly?" She reached for the door controls as he stepped through, the waiting room beyond was dark and warm and felt more like a shelter from atmospheric bombardment than anything else. "I'm worrying that I'm in the wrong position to do any real good."

_That_ was something new. "You don't think you can do something great from the Minister of State position?"

"No, no … it's not like that. I'm just …You have the same mentality as I do about this, so I need you to agree with me or I'm going to hurt someone and it will probably wind up being you or your future brother-in-law. You two seem to be the prime candidates lately."

He grinned. "Sure."

"Politics can accomplish great things on a massive scale, much bigger than any other singular arena. So the people who _should_ be in the political scene are responsible people who _don't want_ to be there, right? Do you agree with me on this?"

"Yes. Of course." He dropped into the nearest soft-backed chair. "The minute you want power is the minute you shouldn't have it."

"Right." She tossed her day bag onto a chair in the living room as she left him to grab the nearest bottle of wine she could find. She came back with three long-stemmed glasses. "So I'm where I should be."

He thought it was an odd thing to say, but he agreed with her because he did genuinely agree. The galaxy needed people like Leia at its helm, because it wasn't the natural order of things to be fair and just. The galaxy ran on chaos; it was only the desire of the people of the galaxy for peace that allowed it to happen. Beyond that, the Force created the players that ran the galaxy, and there weren't a whole lot of people who were as qualified as Leia was to guarantee that another Palpatine wasn't anywhere near the powers-that-be.

"Of course you're where you should be. Why would you think otherwise?"

She looked at him, her eyes big and round and impossibly still. He noticed that her impression on the Force shut down minutely – she felt dimmer to him by just a few degrees. "I don't think otherwise," she said. "I just needed some backup."

* * *

Han was slouched in one of Leia's office's too-comfortable guest conform couches, struggling to remain awake and coherent and all the other things that he figured he should be when she finally came back.

But her office was a nice respite from the overly mechanical office he half-heartedly maintained, and it was warm. Leia hadn't decorated it, but he could tell someone who knew her well had – Winter, probably – because it felt very natural and reminded him of Kashyyyk's wroshyr trees and the bare sky they touched. Part of him wondered if he could get Winter to do something with his office, then he remembered that he avoided the place anyway and that there was no point in trying to trick hell into being peaceful. Still, Leia's office wasn't hideous and it didn't look sterile.

She wasn't expecting him; he hadn't been feeling generous enough to comm beforehand and he had honestly, though he'd never admit it, felt like touching her skin this afternoon. Chewie was on the _Falcon_, tinkering on the hyperdrive's casing – the minute cracks in the durasteel weren't ominous yet, but Chewie had always had this knack of catching tiny troubles before they got out of hand – and Han was flat-out avoiding anyone who had a desire to call him 'sir'. And Han enjoyed being near enough to Leia to be able to do things like this, stop by when he wanted to, see her as much as he could. It was easy to pretend that he didn't need to see her every morning when he was on assignment. It was harder when the reality - the _possibility_ – actually existed.

So he sat here, waiting, as always, for her to come back.

His comm's alert went off, and he grabbed it on instinct. It wasn't smart to ignore a communiqué like that, because it could mean bad news and bad news meant something needed to be done right _then_ so that 'bad' news didn't become 'unsolvable' news. He answered it on the second alert, was mildly annoyed when a deep, authoritative, overused voice barked his name.

"Well, Airen. Hi." He was nodding by habit; he had the comm on voice-only mode. "Forgive me for not properly kissing your ass when I got back. Had better things on my mind."

"Sure, sure. I haven't been in the mood for ass-kissing lately, either."

"Good to hear it." The other general sounded too amicable, too lighthearted. "What do you have for me today?"

"I have news on Teradoc."

Han sat up, and switched the comm to visual mode. "Do you?" He let a fraction of his interest creep into his voice, but worked hard against the impulse to raise his eyebrow.

Cracken's face took up the entire screen and his eyes looked redder than Han had last seen them. He dumbly wondered if the general had recently given up his cantankerous whiskey habit. "Get to my office."

Part of him really wanted to ignore this call, wanted to turn the comm off and wait for Leia in peace, wait for an afternoon spent somewhere other than a metallic office in the heart of the Intelligence building. The problem was, ultimately, that if she found out he ignored the call – and she _always_ found out, it was a gift of hers – he wouldn't get to do any of the things he wanted to do with her anyway.

He sighed. "Give me ten minutes."

It didn't take that long to reach Cracken's wing, but Han doubled back and picked up a few things from his quarters just to be late and piss the general off. It hadn't worked in the slightest; when Han walked into the office, Cracken had his back to him and was tilting a miserable-looking plant toward the one slant of natural light that made it into the room. Han walked forward and plopped down into the chair opposite the giant, meticulously misarranged desk. "So. Teradoc."

"Teradoc," Cracken said, his back still to Han, his voice as gravel-filled as it had sounded on the comm, "isn't your man."

Han knew that Cracken was toying with him, was trying to wrangle a surprised reaction out of him. "Really?"

"Really. What you should be looking for is much, much worse." The general turned around, wiped his hands on a nearby towel. "Reuniting the Remnant fleet, as best as we can tell."

_That_ was something to think about. "How does a faux-attack on Coruscant and a commandeered capital ship reunite the fleet?"

"That was Teradoc. Miniscule-brained moron that he is, he honestly thought the feint would work."

"It did work."

"For a time," Cracken nodded, sitting in his nerfhide-covered chair. "We've already tracked the _Rebel Dream_. It'll be ours again in two months, at most."

_Cocky bastard._ Han had seen the vid. That ship wouldn't be considered a prize at the moment; it had bled vacuum-compressed bodies from the inside. No one would want to recapture that until the Imperials had repaired it and made it worth stealing back. "You going to make this hard on me? Make me guess?"

"General Solo," Cracken's eyes narrowed and Han suddenly realized that the older man wasn't toying with him in the slightest. "This news isn't going to the navy and it's not going to be gifted to the government."

Something fell in his chest, and he wasn't sure exactly what it was. _It's bad_, Han thought. _It's bad enough that the navy can't handle it and the government isn't ready for it yet._ "Cracken, I'm navy."

"You're one stick short of quitting and becoming a stay-at-home consort to one of the least diplomatic diplomats in the history of the galaxy."

Han felt his anger tick up a notch, tried to settle it before he did something really stupid. "Who said I was quitting?"

"Your fiancée. At lunch with her brother two days ago."

It was supremely difficult to stay rooted to the chair; anger rolled through his veins until he thought he could etch markings into the chair with his fingernails. "You're watching us."

It was a stupid comment; Cracken didn't dignify it with an answer. "Quit the navy, join NRI. You can deal with things however you want to, but I need a wild card and you fit."

"A wild card to do _what_?" Things were spinning out of control. He was still viciously angry at Cracken for tapping them and at himself for not realizing that it was being done. "You're barking at the wrong general, Airen."

"No. I'm not." Cracken typed in a command at his terminal. "I'm sending you away with one more slice of Intel to think about while you're off playing paper soldier." He turned his terminal screen around so that Han saw a three-dimensional, holo-projected reconstruction of the Sluis Van shipyards; the crescent over the hull of the nearest ship made it wildly clear where the image was from. "Keep focusing on Fondor and you'll miss the fireworks. The action will be _here_, not Fondor, and it won't be from Teradoc." He tapped the screen again and it went blank. "Compare notes with the Minister of State, Solo."

"She's not Minister of State." _Yet._

Cracken waived a hand. "Details. Make sure she sees that if she needs a reminder."

Han stood up and left, too angry and shocked and confused about what had just happened to actually _act_ angry or shocked or confused.

* * *

Curled up on their couch with Han behind her, Leia realized that her thinking was skewed in some very fundamental ways.

For instance, if she was supposed to be so unhappy with her life path, why didn't she hate where she was?

Ultimately, she wasn't upset or angry with her life at the moment. There were times, yes, when she felt like she was being pulled in different directions, but it never really amounted to anything. When Han was around it was easier, too. He was the most personal part of her personal life, and he wouldn't take no for an answer. She functioned in two different spheres because she had, right now, what she had always wanted: a public life in which she was able to _see_ a difference being made, and a personal life that made her feel like it was all worth it.

She ignored the voice in her head that was reminding her of Han's almost-for-certain deployment.

_I've learned two things about diplomats in my time here. One is that they feel the need to unnecessarily compartmentalize their lives._

She heard Airen Cracken's voice in her head and tried hard not to wince.

_Are you under the impression that you function as a politician outside of how you function as a private citizen?_

No. She knew Han's Leia was the same woman as the politician Leia. She hadn't compartmentalized her life that much.

Han was running his hand up the outside of her thigh as if she didn't know what he was intending, and she pushed Cracken out of her mind. "I still don't think I understand why this is so fascinating to you."

His head was propped up on the arm of the couch behind her, and his hand dipped down to the back of her knee. "Smashball isn't fascinating. It's necessary."

"For who?"

"For people who can't wiggle their fingers and get whatever they want."

She clucked her tongue in mock-anger, but settled in further against his body. "I never did that."

"Fine. For people who have no hope of wiggling their fingers and getting whatever they want."

She was very tempted to deny what he said, but it rang too true for her to have a prayer of winning. "Now that you could buy tickets and see it live, why do you still watch it like this?"

There were times when she was sure he was just as good at multitasking as she was, but those moments were rare and far between, and mostly concentrated in the cockpit or times like these, where he considered 'entertainment' to include her presence when he wouldn't normally have it. "Have you seen what they're paying me?" His lips skimmed her ear, but he pressed his forehead against the back of her head. "There's no way I could buy anything except maybe a holoset to watch the damn game with."

She snorted. "You make more than that."

If he thought she'd lost track of where his hand was, how slowly it was creeping up the back of her leg, he was very, very mistaken. "I do not. I have to supplement with your kept man gig to break even sometimes."

"You would be a terrible kept man," she said, because his hand had reached its goal, and she wasn't entirely prepared to give in yet. "Attitude is not part of the job description."

"No?" he said as she arched her back against him. His lips fell to her neck. "You aren't complaining."

No, she wasn't, but there were moments when she really wished she could. "I didn't mean _my_ kept man. I'm an easy customer when it comes to you."

He laughed as his other hand grabbed her waist and pulled her to her back, his knee sliding in-between her legs. "Leia, if you were easy, I lost my game a long time ago." He leaned in to her ear, took the lobe between his teeth, flicked his tongue against the shell. "You were the hardest sell I ever had to make."

She pulled his head up, kissed him hard. His lips were rough against hers, and the hand on her waist had slid up to fiddle with the enclosures of her shirt, sending strokes of cold down her spine. She felt her heartbeat in her ear and in her chest as he settled, relished that primitive part of her brain that rejoiced as his weight pushed her down.

"Is it a bad game, then?" she asked, as she ran her fingers down his arm.

He kissed her again, then chuckled and said, "This is a better one." Her arms came up around him and her legs wrapped around his thighs by instinct. It was still a novelty to have him here for moments like this; it shouldn't be, but it was, and it only served to make _him_ and only _him_ necessary. She had his shirt open, and her hands swept the expanse of his chest, and she felt his breathing quicken. One of his hands crept past her trousers and Leia jerked her head to the side as he played with the fabric, feeling tenebrous energy run up and down her body, everywhere that her skin brushed his. She felt punch-drunk and electrified and couldn't stop pressing her fingernails into his shoulder blades, though she knew he would complain about it later.

A _ping_ signaled the door. Leia broke this kiss, pulled her hands from his neck as he sat up. The look on his face was as surprised as she felt, and he spent a moment reattaching her shirt fastenings for her as she worked to compose her face. She tried to breathe and stood up, feeling disoriented and deprived and one part of her mind simply seemed to radiate _I told you so …_

When she opened the door, there was a moment of too-bright light and a garbled mess of a message, before she ascertained that their visitor was dressed in non-descript browns but with a suspicious-looking gun rig down one thigh and an identification chip that he held out in front of his body like a peace offering.

"Princess, may I see General Solo?"

She knew Han heard, because there was a muttered malediction and the sound of his exit from the room to their bedroom, _away_ from the main door.

"Are you here in an official capacity?"

The messenger nodded. "From Admiral Ackbar."

Leia knew it had been coming, but the moment hurt more than she wanted to admit. "Why a human messenger – ?" she stopped herself. "Right."

"I need to speak directly to General Solo, ma'am." The messenger looked like he was more than a little intimidated. His voice squeaked over Han's rank. "It's a matter of security."

"Shavit. I'm here." Han's head peeked into her field of vision, a more appropriate shirt on his shoulders, fastened and relatively smooth. His hand snaked out, palm out, between her body and where her arm was on the doorframe, supporting her weight. "Do you have a notice with you?"

"No, sir," the messenger said, "because it's a security risk. You're being summoned in person by an official delegate of the military."

"Summoned …" Leia said, turned toward where Han stood, his face dark and the cords in his neck protruding. "You're leaving." The words sounded much colder than she felt at the moment. Inside she was a mess of arousal, anger, and desperation but no one had to know that. The look Han gave her told her that he already knew.

"Like hell I am," he refocused on the messenger. "Go back to Ackbar and tell him he's going to have to haul me in with binders and a smoking blaster."

The messenger's face flattened and he licked his lips nervously. "Sir, you can't just ignore a summons."

"Watch me," Han spat, curling his arm around Leia's waist and dragging her back into their living room before the door swished closed. She could feel how tight his body had become, was hyperaware of the hiss of his breath as he let her go and went back toward the bedroom. She followed. He was bent over the bed, rifling through a cloth bag the size of a pillowcase. His hair was flung into his eyes and he said, "They can't do this to me anymore, Leia."

She agreed silently. He hadn't found whatever he was looking for in the bag and began to look in drawers and boxes under the bed. "What are you looking for?"

"A comm."

"For what?" _Who could he want to call at …_ She checked the terminal screen on her nightstand. It was too late to call anyone other than medical personnel and perhaps Luke.

"I'm not a punk kid they can just order wherever they want to." He pulled his hands out from under the bed and sat up, a discarded comm clutched in one fist. "I've sacrificed too much for them to screw with my life whenever it's _convenient_." He sneered the word, and Leia thought of a moment nearly six years ago, before they were anything more than public enemies and private friends.

_You know, there are times when I think, 'This isn't so bad.' And then I have to remind myself that there are kids here who are dying for what you believe in. And I don't know, Princess. Is that a high enough gamble for you?_

"Of course."_ He's going to march into Ackbar's office right now, blaster out and ready to go._ She loved him and she didn't trust him when he got angry like this; experience had taught her to read Han's body language as an inaccurate display of what he was really thinking, unless he was angry and threatening, which were sure signs that he was off to do whatever he thought he needed to. "Just go to Ackbar and request a reassignment."

He snorted. "Yeah. That's a great plan." He stood up, grabbed an old jacket from the bed. "They'd really reconsider _if I asked them to_."

"They might."

"They won't, Leia. Think about it. I filed a complaint with Ackbar the day you told me about it, and all I got was some diplomatic shit about how I'm 'the fittest officer for the assignment'. I'm betting the fish doesn't have anything on his mind at this moment except what's going on over _there_." He pointed across the room towards a vase of lilies, in the direction of the Senate building, beyond the wall that separated their bedroom from the traffic outside. "_That's_ what has decided everything for me the past few years, and I'm tired of it."

"So you're resigning your commission?" She stopped. "They wouldn't let you do that, either. You're too visible right now, too famous after Zsinj."

"Right." He shrugged into the jacket and closed it. "So I'm going to someone who can fix that."

She followed him to the door. "Who?"

"Well," he said, and her back burst with goose bumps from the hitch in his voice, "that I can't tell you." He slid a finger down her neck, from the lobe of her ear to her collarbone to where the shirt she was wearing interrupted his trail. "But I promise it's not an assassin, okay?"

He grinned and left, and Leia went to go sit down on the couch and watch what was left of the smashball game, her stomach involved in a series of twists that made her wish he hadn't left just yet. She sighed and curled up, her knees to her chest, as she watched Rip Calkin score again and again against a team of hooded black figures.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: I really do appreciate the comments some of you are sending. Thank you very much! As I've told some of you in my responses, the vignettes I've written ("Solo's Girl" and the rest) are all available to read here on ffn, and the preferred order is on the first page of this story. Those stories occur _after _this one, though you can read the development of the ideas (and - ahem - my "abilities" as a writer) as you go through them.

Also, the fourth chapter of this baby was far too short and mind-numbingly boring, even after I tried adding a scene, so I took out the scene entirely and squashed it in with what was my fifth chapter to make one really uber long chapter of death/doom/the apocalypse. Um ... really, it was just because I felt like it. The only thing is that it means more foul language. So, you know. That's there. Enjoy!

* * *

You would think after four years of working the place, of risking his neck again and again and again, that he would have anticipated their power play: that they wouldn't be able to figure out a way to piss him off that hadn't been tried before.

But this … this was like watching the very thing he'd been working for fall apart in front of his eyes.

He knew he was taking it too hard; it was a mission they wanted him to go on, and one that he probably _would _have gone on if things were different. If he were honest, he'd admit that _she_ was the biggest reason he wasn't going. There was a stupid, primitive part of him that wanted her to want to be with him and an even deeper, unacknowledged part that was worried she didn't.

He could pin it to the marriage arguments if he thought about it hard enough. He knew it was ridiculous. But it had been _four damn years_ and he wasn't sure he could handle the next four it would take her to decide that the galaxy was stable enough.

They'd sacrificed a lot for the better good. He didn't understand why their relationship was part of it. It was symptomatic of something else, and he just didn't think he knew what it was.

But it went farther than that, too, because he didn't want to go. He'd spent the better part of two years chasing Zsinj, and the dead idiot bastard was still finding ways to torture him. Beyond that, he didn't like being a pawn in someone else's game and he didn't like being a celebrity that was only handy to have around for media events and diplomatic missions that had no chance of succeeding. He wasn't cut out for being a subordinate, and he wasn't ready to bow down and accept orders that made no sense and did little to actually help anyone. _That_ wasn't why he was doing this and _that_ wasn't why he came back.

Han Solo hadn't joined the Rebellion to wear a uniform; he suddenly couldn't remember what had made him continue the charade. It was too much time to call a fling and not long enough to call a career, and he didn't think it landed anywhere on those extremes. The whole point of becoming a general was a mixed-up jumble of Leia, the atrocities he'd seen the Empire commit, and the people that worked under him, but he hadn't ever agreed to follow politicians blindly as they gambled on lives they didn't know and on situations they didn't understand.

He stalked down the walkways, trying to sort out why he was really upset and not succeeding in the slightest. He fumed until he got to Airen Cracken's private residence, pressing the announcement button again and again and again until he heard the _click_ of a blaster being set behind him.

"What the hell are you doing, Solo?"

"They're deploying me." _Again._

"Huh," the older general said, and Han turned around. Cracken wasn't in civilian clothes and his eyes didn't look tired. _The man doesn't have a life outside,_ Han thought and glanced down the corridor to ascertain that they were alone. "Well, that's nice. Enjoy freighting around diplomats and politicians."

"And I'm not going."

"Excellent. They'll court-marshal you and it won't mean a thing. You're going if they tell you to go."

Han shook his head. "I'd resign my commission before they could."

"Except they won't let you. And I'm not giving you any shelter for that here."

"I'm agreeing to do freelance work for the NRI." He rolled his eyes. "That is, if the offer stands."

"Interesting." Cracken shook his head. "I don't need Ackbar all over me, Solo."

Han leaned up against the doorway he had been facing, sure now that it was a feint. "NRI has exclusivity. If you want something, you get it. You've got black ops divisions, I know you do; all you'd have to do is tuck me away into some nice neat corner, and Ackbar's got nothing to bitch about. You get them to take me off the roster of the Teradoc mission, and I'll be the best damn trigger-happy Intel op you've ever seen."

"I do this, and I'm stuck with you until your commission expires."

Han nodded. "You can have me doing whatever you want, as long as it's in-system and as long as I get my three months."

"Even if it's doing paperwork and mapping spice busts?"

"At this point I could care less." Han grinned. "Though you know I'm too good to be doing that."

Cracken folded his arms against his chest, his finger still resting on the trigger of the blaster he held, and seemed to consider Han's words carefully. "Why do you really want to do this?"

"I don't want to go. Plain and simple."

"No," Cracken said, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Why _really?"_

He considered that. If all it took was an explanation to get out of leaving for another month-long mission, it was worth it. "Because," Han said, his voice as quiet as Cracken's. "Because I'm not ready to die because someone told me I had to. That's not heroism; that's stupidity."

Cracken's face was absolutely still, without a trace of guile or hidden agenda, but with a sternness and sterility that made even Crix Madine look soft by comparison. It was a good minute before the older man nodded and held out a hand, as he said, "It's as good a reason as any. Welcome aboard."

* * *

General Airen Cracken hated his job because he was fantastic at it and because there was a small part of him that thought that was too awful a thing to stand.

The minute Solo left, Cracken called his assistant Plo Clung, a sharp Academy grad from Ithor, and ordered an indiscriminate sweep of the _Millennium Falcon._ 'Indiscriminate' was the main directive because Solo was as territorial as Corellians got, and it was already hard enough dealing with the man. He didn't need to wear abuse about having Solo's piece-of-junk ship watched.

Cracken leaned back in his chair and considered Solo and – by extension – Leia Organa. He had a game plan, but, like all plans inevitably do, it had already jumped off course. If he'd been a gambling man, he would've bet anything that Organa would have taken the offer first. Instead Solo – the inerrant anti-sycophant – was joining up in what Cracken suspected was a defensive act against the new Senate. Surprising, but not uncharacteristic.

The real question was if Organa was dependent enough to follow him.

Cracken grinned to himself, ignoring the faint cackle his fleeting empathy sang in his ear. He was too good at this job to mind manipulation, particularly if it got him what he needed for the better good.

Hating this job meant doing it well enough to earn the guilt he couldn't quite get rid of. _A sharp edge to take out the enemy breastplate_, the saying went, and Cracken had all sorts of experience at being a hated man.

He grimaced, then switched his comm frequency to Fleet Command's general office. It stalled, then pushed on, and Cracken set his annoyance aside. He was about to become hated again, after all.

* * *

It wasn't that Han expected Leia to take the news well. He expected her to question his efforts to make deals with Cracken, maybe even get angry about it, but she was acting like he'd committed treason.

"Do you have any idea what you could be asked to do? This is Airen _Cracken_, Han, not Carlist or Jan."

He shuffled over to their couch, tumbled down into it. "Yeah. _He's_ a pain in the ass."

"No," she turned to him. "Cracken doesn't make deals. He's back-doors and manipulative and he's going to ask you for something in return."

"I'm not going after Teradoc. I said no, and they're sending me anyway, and that is exactly why I couldn't deal with the Imperial fighter corp, too."

"They asked for you to help them secure peace for us."

"They _asked_ me," he rolled his eyes, "because some shit-punk politician needs to prove to his new constituency that he's buddy-buddy with the military. And you think that, too, so don't give me anything about peace. You know that's not what they're after."

She conceded that with her eyes, though her mouth didn't go anywhere near admitting it. "Did you sign anything?"

"No." The word was an instant relief; at least something he was saying wasn't putting her nerves on display. "I have my transfer request here."

He brought out the datapad and she looked at it; he wanted to tell her not to worry, but the words wouldn't come out.

"You could …" She reached for the datapad and stepped closer to him. "He could put you in black ops, or surveillance. Or you could be undercover somewhere I didn't know existed, and I would never know if you got hurt or …" Her voice trailed off, and Han had a sudden image of how burning skin patches together over a wound to prevent massive hemorrhaging. She felt weak for admitting her weakness, though he didn't blame her in the slightest.

"I asked about that," he said. "Your clearance is high enough that you're privy to everything except things falling under a specific heading related to intelligence leaks in the executive offices." He grimaced. "Well, you are if …"

"… If I'm Minister of State."

"Right."

She bit her lower lip. "I wouldn't get dailies about you. I'd have to talk to him directly – or you – to know where you are. I have no legal right to know about your station specifically."

He watched her eyes carefully. "Unless we're married."

Her face didn't change at all, except her eyes slid to the left as she broke eye contact. It was a dead tell; if he were feeling generous someday he might tell her so. "Is _that _what this is about?"

"This is about me being unwilling to go to the other side of the galaxy because the brass says so."

"But you've figured out a way to make all this lead back to the marriage thing."

He had. It had been part of the decision at least. But she didn't have to know that. "I'm just good like that."

She scowled, stood up from the couch, turned to face him again, and her arms were crossed so tightly across her chest that he could see the individual muscles of her forearms. "I won't agree to that, and you know why."

"No, actually," he was trying to keep a lid on his temper, but he'd never been good at it in the first place. Right now his hold was tenuous at best. "I _don't _know why."

"It shouldn't matter if we're married or not, should it? Isn't that doing exactly what you don't want to do? Get tied down to a relationship simply because everyone expects it?"

He gestured mindlessly. "I want you to want to do this."

He could see her thinking. Hard. "You think I don't?" She flashed a sardonic grin. "And emotional coercion is _definitely_ the way to get what you want."

"Emotional – "

"Oh, keep going, _please_. You're on a roll."

Her sardonic tone rankled what little control he had over his anger. He was proud for simply being able to control the volume of his voice. "I _think_ you don't know what you want. You've fought with me about this over and over - "

"I've fought with you about this?"

Maybe _fighting_ wasn't the right word, but it was close enough. "You're avoiding it."

"Yes." He was facing the side of her head and he didn't want to see her eyes. "I'm avoiding it because I want it done on my terms."

"Me, too." He knew this was her ready excuse. But something was off about the whole thing, and it was taking her a hell of a lot longer to figure it out than it should. "But maybe ... maybe this isn't about you so much. Maybe this actually is easier than you think it is. Hell, Leia, what do you think we've signed up for here?"

She glared at him. "I know what I'm doing."

"Sure you do." He nodded. "You know it all, yeah? You think you have it all packaged out for us?" He gripped the sideboard and pretended he could break the wood. "I don't want to wait and neither do you. So why in hell are we waiting?"

"Try to be selfless for a moment, please - "

"You first."

"I wouldn't say I wanted to marry you if I didn't want to marry you."

"Nice," he said. "Thank you so much for that assurance."

"_But_ - " she interrupted him, "things are not quiet enough right now. The whole galaxy's turned completely upside down, and I can't handle any more of it, okay?"

"Let me explain something to you," he said as he leaned against the wall. "The galaxy is never going to be stable. Ever. And right now _this_ is the only thing that makes genuine and complete sense to me."

He hadn't meant to admit that, and she didn't know how to respond to it. Her hands had splayed out completely near her stomach. It was another tell, one that she knew about but one she was struggling to break.

He continued. "So you don't want to get married, _fine_. But don't make up excuses. Tell me the real reason why you won't and stop your goddamned sacrificial act, because it's gone way past normal."

She glared at him. "You are so arrogant to think that you can demand anything from me."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Try it from this side." Her eyes looked smaller, more intense. "Why?"

"No."

"Fine. Then why _not_?"

"No."

He watched her, and he had the sickening feeling that she was sizing him up. "Tell me why. Tell me, or I'll sign the transfer right now."

He knew that it would hurt, which made it hurt even more. "No, you won't."

"Try me." He sighed. "You love me. But the more you put it off, the more I wonder what you're really thinking and I can't stand being the only one talking." She was silent, so he moved towards the door, past her. "I have to get out of here before you say something stupid."

"Before I - "

He was already through the door.

* * *

Leia hated the way certain species said her name, because the root accent for it was Alderaani and name pronunciation got tricky when a culture was, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. Furthermore, not all species aged like humans did, so some of her peers had been born or hatched or grown in a galactic political sphere in which Alderaan wasn't anything but a mention in the textbooks.

The Mon Calamari accent mutilated it the worst, she thought. The Basic-speaking Mon Cal voice was a lot like their capital ships: tough but mutable and with a consistency like gravel.

Ackbar wasn't happy, to say the least, and so he had been arguing with Leia for the past fifteen minutes, slaughtering her given name with all the idiosyncratic harshness that only a Mon Calamari admiral could. He had apparently decided to interrogate Leia about her fiancée's 'underhanded, totally inappropriate maneuvers' that had left a slue of politicians on the poor Admiral's back. Leia couldn't find it in her to feel any sympathy. She was taking her own share of the flack.

In fact, last time she checked, the only person involved with the whole fiasco who _wasn't_ suffering from it was Han Solo.

"Admiral, I can't control what he does," she admitted. "And I don't think anything you say to _me_ about the whole thing is going to make any difference to him."

"My political advisor has warned me that I can't afford to court-marshal General Solo, though, honestly, nothing would please me more right now." His eyestalks looked like they stood straighter, though that really wasn't possible. Leia thought she might be hallucinating. "Princess, you don't seem at all concerned."

"Part of me agrees with him."

"Part," he spat. "_All _of you is a sworn member of the Provisional Council."

She nodded. "And as such, I was opposed to sending him."

He shook his head and moved toward the door. "Princess, if you can't convince him to accept his responsibility as a commissioned officer of the New Republic, he _will_ be transferred to Intelligence, and you know as well as I do what that means for you."

She did, but she'd be damned before she let Ackbar see how much it rankled her. "Admiral, I have no sway in Han Solo's decisions, professionally or otherwise. If you wish to convince him to retain his current position, you have to talk with him yourself."

"I have. Twice."

_And gotten nowhere._ "Then there's nothing else to discuss."

As he left, she sighed and moved towards her desk. The whole mess was a giant trap, she had already realized. It didn't help to know it. Han had pulled out the stops and made it virtually impossible for her to make a decision that _wouldn't_ end up with a concession on her part. If she agreed to marry him, he would … what? Stay where he was? Get forced into missions he didn't agree with?

The darker possibility lurked, too. What would they ask him to do next? A celebrity general, with wider appeal than Rieekan or Dodonna or Madine, capable of rogue tactics and on the spot coordination … she didn't want to know. It was a little too frightening to think of the things everyday people, of any species, were willing to do for the greater good.

She stopped herself.

"Had a rough morning?" Winter slipped into the room, and Leia wasn't sure whether or not this was a good thing.

She crinkled her nose. "Incomparably bad. How's yours?"

"Better than yours." Winter smiled. "Obviously. What was the admiral doing here?"

"He would be the last in a long stream of people coming to privately dictate how to chastise my fiancé."

Winter settled into the chair opposite Leia's desk. "_Right_."

"Exactly." There were vague dark shapes in the corner of her eyes, and she suspected she was more tired than she previously thought. "I don't know what good they think it'll do them. If they want to take his commission, just do it. Stop wasting _my_ time."

Winter nodded. "What's Han's reaction to all this?"

"I haven't talked to him yet today." She grimaced. "But I know what he'll say."

"Something like 'why does it matter?'"

"Yes. And, honestly, Winter … either way, he's tied to something that I don't agree with."

"You wouldn't prefer him in the NRI to the navy?"

Leia sighed. "No offense, but I would prefer to run away with him and not be found. Ever."

It was a joke, but it also wasn't, and she wasn't quite sure if Winter understood that or not. More often than not, her confidante and aide knew things without Leia ever saying them, making it impossible to overestimate her abilities. It had been so effortless for her that Leia had privately asked Luke to check Winter for any previously-unknown Force adeptness. The answer was, of course, negative and Leia was forced to chalk up Winter's perception to the unfaced quality that made an increasingly large group of people she knew almost supernaturally perceptive.

"Can I ask you a question?"

Winter's head came up, away from the datapad she was scrutinizing. "Of course. Am I aide-Winter or friend-Winter?"

"Both," Leia said, trying to imagine Winter filling only one of those roles at a time. "How, hypothetically, would Han be able to talk Airen into this sort of duplicity?"

Her aide's white hair glimmered in the overhead lights, and Leia felt a wash of anticipation flow over her, the ebb and flow of the inherent power in her blood temporarily taking control, warning her of something she was not prepared to accept, though she had no idea what it was.

"Leia, General Cracken is not the kind of man to be swayed by much of anything." Winter's hands were frozen into place in her lap, and her smallest finger twitched just enough for Leia to see. "Han wouldn't be able to talk him into it."

"So Cracken agreed when Han asked. Or Cracken asked ..." Leia said, the tightening in her neck hitting a crescendo, remembering her meeting with Cracken the day Han had returned. "I don't know whether to be angrier at Han or at Cracken."

"Han isn't talking?"

"_No one_ is talking." Leia reached over, took the datapad Winter offered her. "I don't think it's entirely duplicitous, either. That's what scares me."

"That Han didn't have it all thought out before?"

"Right. It makes a few things even harder to understand." She told Winter about the ultimatum Han had presented her the night before, how he'd managed to get the marriage issue rolled into a situation that was already more than a little complex. "It's like I can't trust him to not go behind my back and do something potentially destructive."

"I don't think that's it. You can trust Han to do what he thinks is best for _you_."

"For me? Making me the fulcrum of this thing?" She snorted. "I don't think so."

"I do." Winter sounded very confident. "You don't think everything that man does is for your benefit in one way or another?"

"That's ridiculous, Winter. He's not like that."

"Like what?"

"Weak like that."

Winter sighed. "That's not weakness. It's …" She hunted for the right word. "He's the kind of man that knows he can't afford to mess up what he has."

She raised an eyebrow. "Which is why he's forcing me to marry him."

Winter grimaced. "Yes. Something like that."

"That makes no sense." Leia shook her head. "There's nothing to lose. We're already way past the point of not knowing what we're getting into."

"I don't think that's what this is." Winter stood up and sat on Leia's desk. "I think he's wondering why you won't marry him and so he's thrown you into this massive test."

"This isn't a test. The mission to Teradoc was out of his control."

"Han is nothing if not opportunistic, yes?" Winter's eyebrow shot up. "All I'm saying is that you need to take a moment to figure out what it is you want to do about it."

"That's all you've been saying lately."

"Maybe it's what you need to hear, then."

Leia sighed. The downside of having Winter around is that she didn't allow much self-denial. It was a blessing and a curse, though, at the moment, Leia was more willing to call it a curse.

She was about to comment when the comm clicked on in her office, and a shrill voice announced the presence of three unidentified capital ships within the system. The mechanical voice sounded, to Leia's ears, overly unconcerned and bored.

"Well," Winter said as Leia looked up to the ceiling, as if she could see through the durasteel above her. "This is fun."

* * *

Han Solo's comm chirped loudly, and he tried his best to ignore it. If he went to answer it, he'd have to crawl outside the _Falcon's_ hyperdrive cove, and he just plain didn't like the thought of that.

He happily ignored the comm as he focused on the frayed motivator wires he was trying to solder together, until Chewie burst through the door panel and rumbled a jumbled mess of ship classifications and coordinates.

"_What?"_ He yelled, not sure if he'd heard correctly. "Where?"

Chewie rumbled, quieter now though no less urgent.

"Sithspawn, I told them – " he pushed himself out from under the motivator, standing up too fast and hitting his head on the low ceiling of the cove. "_Shit_. Power us up, Chewie."

The Wookiee was already gone, and Han took a second to clear his head. There was no sense in trying to fly if he had concussion. It was a good five minutes before Han had decided his head was as undamaged as it had ever been and made it to the cockpit, and, by the time he got there, the _Falcon_ was prepped and cleared for launch.

"Well," he said, tossing himself into the pilot's chair and throwing his hands around the burn thruster controls, "this is fun."

It took less than fifteen minutes for the first three flights of New Republic Navy starfighters to launch, and the Coruscant Planetary Defense Force had already established a clear force of contact against the three capital ships. CPDF, a smallish contingent of the navy, was used to easy bombardment, and had fanned out accordingly, pressing into the nearest of the capital ships. Neither side had fired a shot yet, though, with the way the CPDF were oriented, they expected fire very quickly.

Han's initial scan of the foremost enemy ship, a Victory-class Star Destroyer, didn't show any enhanced weaponry or sign of impending doom for the planet below them, so he pulled back and watched the exchange, searching for traps or intended plans. The average enemy didn't assault Coruscant without a plan; especially _now_, when security was heightened after the last attack.

Off to port, Han spotted the first of Coruscant's three natural moons, Centax-1. It, too, was clear of any the gravatic signatures that pointed towards hidden reinforcements. There was little else besides the orbital platforms circling the planet itself, but they hadn't triggered their panic alarms and there was no sign that any ships had docked on or near them since the initial sightings had occurred.

"Chewie, scan the area." He waited a second. "You picking up anything bigger than a freighter around the moons or near the orbital platforms?"

His copilot answered in the negative; no reinforcements within close-set communicable distance. It was just the three ships, then. Han shook his head; it was similar to the last attack – the same nonsensical flight arrangement, the same unanticipated trajectory. An announced arrival that made no sense.

He began a lazy trajectory that took him out of the CPDF ring, heading toward the destroyers to scout the system. He could see no weapon locks, no launched fighters, no tractor beams set, and it was annoying the _hell_ out of him. Something was going on here, and it was not good.

His comm crackled. "General Solo, this is General Cracken."

Han tried to shake the nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him not to answer.

"Yeah, General," he said as he dialed down the inertial compensator. "Can you tell me what I'm looking at?"

Cracken's voice was darker than it should have been. "I'm sending you coordinates. You and Chewbacca can consider yourselves deployed under New Republic Intelligence Charter Law 35-A."

It took a second for that to sink in. He had never – and would never, if he had his way – read any of the thousands of charters that were written while he had been out playing with Zsinj, but, by the way it sounded, NRI was commandeering the _Falcon_ and there was no way in hell that that was going to be an option. Not now, when something was obviously happening _here_. "Cracken, I'm not playing. If you know what these guys are doing, inform us."

"You have your orders. Deploy immediately."

Han's mind was spinning, his thoughts in wild disarray. A ping sounded. "Transmission received." The coordinates that he expected were not what he saw before him. The prefix was too big to be anything nearby; he entered it into the navcomputer, and waited as it plotted the route. When it had finished, he took one glance at the name on the screen and froze. _I should've known. _He redialed his frequency to Cracken's, utterly incensed and unable to keep the venom out of his voice; if he tried hard enough he could hear the threat co-mingling with the words that he spoke. "This is _Sluis Van_."

"Yes. It is."

"Sluis Van is not being attacked."

"You know that, do you?" Cracken's sardonic tone was enough to sour blue milk. "Let me figure out where we need you, Solo. You go where I tell you to."

Han clenched his teeth. "Absolutely not."

"This is me giving you an order."

"This is me telling you to fuck off." It was inconceivable and yet something he had been anticipating in the back of his head. The New Republic was turning out to be one hell of a traitor to its own heroes. "You promised me three months."

"I did. And now I'm taking them away. You have your coordinates."

Han was furious. He watched the ships in the foreground, making their lazy progress out of Coruscant's orbit. Chewbacca sat next to him and made confused, but complimentary, sounds. Neither one of them had signed a transfer. Even _if_ they were ordered somewhere, no one could actually make them deploy.

His retort died as he started to speak it. Things were out of alignment here. If NRI was ordering him out of the system, it was for a valid reason. Cracken had power, but he wouldn't waste the resources setting him up just to get him to go. Plus Cracken had mentioned Sluis Van before … Han shook his head. This was ridiculous. He wasn't seriously considering it.

But the timing … the timing was off, too. It wasn't inconceivable that the ships here – still sitting quietly outside his viewport, no weapons powered up, no understandable motive or movement – and whatever was out where Cracken wanted him to go were linked.

Chewie was staring at him, and he growled impatiently, gesturing towards the comm.

"I don't know, pal. I don't get it, either."

Chewie cocked his head and asked about the gun turrets. Han shook his head before the question was even finished. "No, I want you here." He glanced down at the comm and wondered if Cracken was still waiting for acknowledgement of the order. He slapped the frequency dead; the higher-ups could wait. He toggled the pilot-side communication switch, and set the frequency to Leia's personal comm.

She answered almost immediately. "Where are you?"

He grimaced. "Up here."

"What are we looking at? Should we be worrying?" Her voice was solid and strong, without a hint of anticipation or worry.

He didn't know what to tell her. No, _this_ didn't look bad. This was some punk warlord getting overly ambitious with his toys.

Or it wasn't, and Leia was in the middle of something that was looking more and more suspicious as the seconds wore on.

"I don't know what we're looking at," he said, just to say something. "I'll comm you back in a second."

He cut the communication and sat back, eyeing the three as-of-yet innocent ships. It wasn't enough to take over Coruscant, that was an absolute fact. There wasn't enough firepower in those ships to take over even one of the orbital platforms without a tactical mastermind at the helm, and even then, it'd take more than what those Destroyers looked capable of.

He triggered Cracken's frequency again. "Explain."

Cracken's voice was tight. "You're on an insecure frequency in the presence of enemy ships."

_So they_ are _enemies_. "Give me a reason to go."

"Beyond the order I gave?"

Han punched the settings on his shields, pouring more defense into the _Falcon's_ stern. "Yeah. Beyond that." He eyed Chewie as the Wookiee whuffed quietly in agreement.

Cracken was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter and Han heard a slight buzz surround his words. Apparently, they'd jumped frequencies, and now the communication was secure enough for Cracken. "What you're looking at is connected to Sluis Van, but we're not sure how."

"What _am_ I looking at?"

"Empty ships, with remote captains. A basic skeleton crew without a commander."

Han's lungs burned. "Explosives onboard." It wasn't an _old_ tactic, per se, but it was one that had been used before. He'd seen it work both ways. If the explosives were triggered in the presence of a lot of starfighters, or if it was tractor beamed into a hold, the impending explosion was a wonderful way to take out a lot of hardware and personnel without expending much of your own. If the plan was foiled, you wasted resources but very little personnel yourself.

"We don't think so." Cracken sighed. "Not yet, anyway."

_Not yet?_ "Why am I going to Sluis Van?"

"That I can't tell you. You need to see for yourself. Our assets have been steadily neutralized in the past week."

Han considered that. There wasn't a whole hell of a lot they could make him do if he didn't want to do it. He didn't particularly care about his rank, and the worst they could do was force him to resign, which he'd be happy to do anytime they wanted.

But this sense that there was something _else_ out there, related to the silent ships here, that was worrying Cracken enough to send him out now without proper information and supplies … it made him not nervous, exactly, but more suspicious. Cracken he could deal with. Cracken's intuition … or, worse yet, his informants' … that was something else.

Dead spies said a lot.

He looked at Chewie, who was setting the lateral thrusters to standby, in case they needed a quick getaway. His copilot rumbled without looking up, knowing exactly what Han would decide to do before Han himself knew.

"Right," Han said, then punched in a set of coordinates and took the _Falcon_ into manual control and pointed her planet-side as steeply as he could manage.

* * *

Leia was in the process of watching the three ships above them through the orbital skycam feed and trying to assess the true strength of the force above them. They'd not yet been determined hostiles yet, though their signification on the scanner was painted a garish red and their movements were being analyzed by the second.

She swept a loose lock of hair out of her eyes and looked around the wardroom. Things were quieter here than they should've been, and it was enough to make her suspect the worst.

_"Expect what you can't handle,"_ Winter quoted beside her, "_and be prepared to deal with it."_ She shrugged and turned towards the scanner Leia was looking at. "Giles Durane comes in handy now and then."

"More than he could've hoped for," she responded. "Do you see any viable attack pattern here?"

The three destroyers were aligned in a two-dimensional pyramid offensive form, but it wasn't the appropriate defensive track and it would incur enormous losses from the lateral turbolaser banks if the CPDF were able to circle the formation. It would've been smarter to fan out to counter the naval forces, or to spread to thin out the CPDF fighters, but the three ships did none of this and instead held their positions.

It was unnerving.

"No, I don't," Winter said. "I don't see any tactical benefit at all."

"Right," Leia mumbled, distracted by the sight of Admiral Ackbar rushing into the room. "Winter, do you know where he's been?"

She glanced over at the white-dressed Mon Cal and nodded her head. "Meeting with Mon Mothma." She ran a hand over her forehead and glanced down. "Must've been a long one."

Leia watched as Ackbar communicated with General Uloff, the Devonarian veteran that had created and, subsequently, ran the CPDF. General Uloff was one step away from obsessive-compulsiveness; his driving presence and his excruciating attention to detail were his mainstay. Uloff was meticulous and therefore a superb leader and ideal choice for his position, but he was also murder to work with. That and his tendency towards feminine distraction had made Leia's short interaction with him the first and last time she would work anywhere nearby when he was in the chair.

Uloff was arguing with Ackbar, urging for preemptive action, but Ackbar staid the course and ordered a CPDF retreat from the scene.

"Sir, these are _hostiles_ in our front yard," Uloff said via comm. He was stationed in a lunar orbital base on the other side of the planet, somewhere safe enough that the good general did not risk his own neck. "It's bad enough that they're here in the first place."

Ackbar's voice was significantly calmer. "General, I need your forces in reserve in case this goes badly and our first defensive screen is broken. Your craft can be atmospheric. Ours can't."

Uloff was disappointed but relented, and the screen turned black as he signed off, only to light up again as a new screen became available. This was the feed from the closest Republic ship, the _Daunted_, and it visually confirmed what energy scans had already shown: nothing was coming out of it, no fighters, no tractor beam, no turbolasers.

Ackbar was speaking now with the captain of the _Daunted,_ and Leia caught sections of their dialogue as the two debated safe distances and the validity of a visual asset at the scene, when a familiar hand latched on to her bicep and pulled.

His voice was quiet as she fought to stand straight. "We're leaving."

Leia turned and looked up, aware that many on the bridge were now staring at them. Han's entrance had not gone unnoticed. She looked at him, caught the dulled hazel of his eyes as it flicked around the room, and she knew that he was gauging what to say to her. He was watching Ackbar as he answered her unspoken question. "I don't like this."

"Me, either." _He was just up there._ "Why the change of heart?"

He shook his head. "Not now. Let's go."

He pulled on her bicep again, and, again, she resisted his harder grip. "Are you insane?" She gestured around them. "They need as many eyes as they can get."

Han's eyes finally focused on her, and she felt a shiver go down her spine. He was serious. "I'll explain on the way."

She opened her mouth to tell him exactly what he was going to do, involving lots of inappropriate verbage and anger, when his comm chirped. His hand shot out and he answered with a quiet, commanding voice. "Solo."

"Your window will close in fifteen minutes."

She stared at Han in shock, recognizing the gruff complexity of the voice from his comm. Han glanced at her, his eyes taking a second to gauge hers. "Right."

Airen Cracken's voice held no trace of worry or trepidation. "'Right' means quicker than fifteen minutes. Go."

The comm clicked silent, and Han turned to her, his hand sliding down her arm to her hand. Leia let him grasp it. She was beyond surprised and feeling very much uninformed and for once his very_ presence_ wasn't comforting. It was downright unnerving. Han spoke again, the command in his voice telling her to trust him, that this wasn't a game, and that, yes, he really believed they needed to go. "C'mon."

She still wasn't ready to leave. Something was so very off.

Winter's voice came from beside her. Leia had forgotten she was even there. "Leia, if Cracken tells you that you need to go, you go."

Leia didn't look at her. She was staring at Han and watching his utter sincerity with a feeling roughly equal to being told to jump into an unpressurized docking station without a suit.

He was _honestly_ scared.

She nodded, turned to tell Winter to be careful, worried that whatever had Han so nervous would target her, too, but Han pulled her away from her closest friend before she had the chance. He was dragging her by her hand, and she found herself digging her heels into the hard marble of the floor.

One last question popped into her head, one more thing that she couldn't leave Coruscant without knowing.

"Is Luke in danger?"

He didn't even look back at her. "I don't know. I don't think so." He turned a corner and upped his pace. "I don't know what's going on, and I'd rather have you with me than be worrying about you when I'm _there_ and you're _here_."

"Where's _there_?"

They rounded another corridor before he answered. "_There_ is Sluis Van."


	5. Chapter 5

Thanks, again!

* * *

No news had come since they'd left Coruscant, and they were entering their third day of travel, on the cusp of arriving in the Sluis Van system. Three days of not knowing anything, other than that nothing had fired on Coruscant, was driving Leia absolutely insane. She worried about her brother and Winter, and she worried about Mon Mothma and the chief of state election and she worried about the Coruscant cleanup effort. She worried about all the things she had left behind, at her desk or her quarters or somewhere over _there _in the cesspool of political domination that was the former Imperial City.

She had spent the first hour after they jumped from Coruscant interrogating Han about his dealings with Airen Cracken, hearing a definite note of uncertainty in both generals' assumptions, and trying to convince Han to turn back around. After he refused, adamantly ignoring her threats, she turned to Chewie in the hopes that he would listen.

Now, two days later, it was obvious to her that they were probably right to take no chances and leave, especially when she seriously considered what Cracken had told Han about compromised NRI assets. The only part of their decision that she could really argue with was the part about hauling her out here with them. Any other being but Han Solo would think that to keep someone _safe _would mean to keep them away from the area where spies were turning up dead.

It was a sign of his eccentricity – or perhaps hers – that they were here, in the cockpit of the _Millennium Falcon_, staring at the rocky terrain of Sluis Van in the viewport, the famous shipyards a steely mess of docking arms and swarms of workers in front of them. It was impressive, and it also wasn't: the sight of shipyard facilities had always been interesting to Leia, part of the slue of things her milquetoast aunts had found disgraceful about the heir-apparent of the Organa royal family. But it _wasn't _particularly impressive right now.

As far as she could tell, there was no overhanging, impending disaster waiting to strike the planet, shipyards, or the sector in general.

She was really very tempted to point this out to Han, but Chewie did it for her.

"I don't _know,_" he flicked open the inertial compensator dial, ran a finger down it. "Not all bad things come in huge planet-destroying space stations."

Chewie grunted as Leia spoke up, both making the same point. "Excellent thought. Except there isn't even an interdiction up over the planet."

"Who said there would be?" He took his hand off the compensator, but left the case open. "If there had been, _we _wouldn't be here."

He had a point. Nothing so obviously offensive could have happened here. They weren't on Coruscant. This was spy-game land. She had to alter her thinking.

"Then what are we looking for?" She tracked the communication feed hissing to her right. "Comm traffic is normal, a bit heavier than average, but nothing pointing to known hostiles in the area."

Chewie was checking the nav circuits. It was the same story there, he said. Heavier traffic on the shipyard side of the planet, but not heavy enough to really cause suspicion.

"So we go down and play around for awhile, scope it out."

Leia rolled her eyes. "In the _Millennium Falcon_? With General Han Solo, Chewbacca and Leia Organa aboard?"

"How many people do you _really _think know us by sight? And, on top of that, how many non-human species can even tell us apart from each other?" He stood up, stretched his arms back behind his head, his face utterly devoid of any of the concerns she had for their safety. "You can do whatever you want if it makes you feel better."

She eyed him. "The _ship _– "

"The _Falcon's _a different story." He nodded at her. "You, I can hide. For her, I have contingencies."

"_Contingencies. _You sound like I should feel better."

He grinned, started pushing past his and Chewie's seats, stooped down to kiss the top of her head. "You don't already?" He stood up, opened the hatch, and Leia was more convinced than ever that he was as irritating as he ever had been. "Chewie, can you loop us back toward Candobar?"

Leia heard Chewie's low growl as she vacated her seat and moved back with Han, still half-angry and fully annoyed with him as he rounded the bend toward the hold. "You're doing that _thing _again and it's driving me crazy."

"What _thing?_" He answered, his voice just ahead of her. His head poked out from the bend, a wry grin on his face. "And I drive you crazy in my sleep."

"You do," she agreed. "And you're being flippant and irrational and flying through your options like there are no consequences."

He stepped out from behind the bend and leaned against the plastisteel of the corridor. "Am I?" He wasn't smiling anymore. "I thought I was figuring out why Cracken sent us out here."

"You," Leia said. "He sent _you_, not _us. _And figuring out why we're here would be easier if we just watched the shipyards for awhile. There's nothing on Sluis Van to tempt anyone except for them, and it makes tactical sense to keep your eye on the biggest prize."

"Or you watch the money," Han said, his posture straightening as he pushed off the bulkhead. "And, believe it or not, the money is_ not _with the mechanics and shiphands."

He started walking again to the hold, and Leia struggled to keep up with him. It was the kind of game he often played with her, emphasizing his long stride against hers. She couldn't see him and it was making her angry. "If you're talking about an occupying force, you're talking about the shipyards. What's the strategic value in conquering a hunk of rock without the yards?"

"What's the value in hanging three destroyers out in Coruscant space without either a death wish or enough firepower to knock out an orbital station or two?"

"Exactly. If the two are connected, then Cracken sent you here to ascertain where the connection lies." He sounded like he had stopped walking again, and she blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. "And any intelligent person would put the yards in the center scope and focus on _them."_

"Who said I was intelligent?" She stumbled on him once she rounded the final bend, nearly crashing into his chest as he grabbed a datapad off a case that was nearly two feet taller than she was. "Hey, you," he said, half-smiling as he checked the readout, wrapping his free arm around her.

She stayed where she was. If he walked away again, she'd lose the advantage of being able to _look _at him, and though she may be significantly smaller than him, she knew she held considerable power of his opinion if she were right _there. _"If you aren't focusing on the shipyards, where are you going to start?"

He was still looking at the datapad, but his hand traced up her back to her neck. "The top. The khedive."

She frowned, searched her memory for her Sluissi history. "They still have one?" She'd thought that tradition had died out with the end of the Clone Wars.

He put the datapad back, closed the containment hatch and looked at her. "When you're finally repatriated and freed from tyrannical rule, what do you do? You go back to your old traditions."

"Something like that."

"Well, why wouldn't you start with your government?"

Another good point. "So you're watching the khedive."

"I'm watching the khedive – _we're _watching the khedive." He grinned at her. "Well, and the big stockholders of the shipyards. Money, money, money."

He moved back past her, and Leia realized that was the end of the discussion. As much as she wanted to argue, she was essentially out of options, and even if she were able to outthink him here – which she doubted she could do right here, right now – his plan at least called for them all to be together. She had been afraid he'd resort to keeping her locked on his ship, which wouldn't bode well for either of them. She knew the security codes as well as he did, and, at this point, it was a toss-up whether she was more interested in finding out how Sluis Van was possibly related to Coruscant or hauling jets off the planet with him wandering around the khedive residence with just the clothes on his back.

She sighed. He made things _so_ difficult.

* * *

Chewie was in position on the opposite side of the residence, the grainy terrain completely obscuring his visual, and Han was tired of hearing about it. Han himself was closer to the entrance, down in the valley, and Leia was sitting outside the back gate of the councilors' entrance, about a klick away.

Han had been here, a lifetime ago, and he wasn't sure that he had experienced the torrential dust that coated everything in sight. It felt different, at least, though he knew for a fact that no cataclysmic event had occurred here and changed the landscape from what he remembered to what he now saw.

He was just getting old.

Adjusting his his long-range specs, he zeroed in on Chewie's outcropping. Han couldn't see him, which, really, was a good thing. If the Wookiee couldn't see, that was his problem. He knew better than to position himself so far out. Both of them – Chewie and Leia – had argued with him about watching this building, and they were punishing him by bitching to him about it. He didn't understand why they were _fighting_ with him about this; out of all the stupid things he'd made them do, this hardly qualified as a serious risk.

Someday he'd learn not to get attached to strong-willed and good-hearted people. They just got him into trouble.

Movement caught his eye from his peripheral vision, and he tilted his head to catch whatever it was. He spotted a hand grasping on top of the ledge of the outrock he was laying on, and tried very hard not to make too much noise. The hand's long, claw-like nails pushed through the sand before gaining enough of a hold to risk moving the second hand onto the outlay. Han adjusted the hold he had on his blaster, debating whether to fire on the overgrown lizard or let it tumble around the rocks for another hour before it finally reached it's perch.

He cursed under his breath and crawled backwards behind the rock again. The damn thing was disrupting every angle he had, and it was pissing him off. He slid his legs to the right and tried to aim his body away from the rock wall as he tumbled off the outrock, falling into a pile of leaves and other assorted soft-like elements with an _oof _and a string of invectives longer than his grapple line.

Leia commed him again, this time with text attached: _You're an idiot._

He thought about ignoring it. _I'm changing positions,_ he typed instead, almost proud of himself for his restraint. He stood up and dusted himself off, grimacing as the familiar prick of the routine "falling off stupidly high things" pain settled between his shoulderblades and wound up nestled somewhere that hurt to walk. He sighed and shimmied down the rock, lugging his receiver and equipment with all the grace of a wampa, his legs protesting initially and then acquiescing after his circulation started working again.

It took him an hour to find a new position, this one much closer to ground zero. He was settled in a corner of a dark, seedy little bar in front of an open-air window directly across the alley from the building. Leia had commed him twice, once asking him where he was going and the other telling him, in a slightly panicked tone, that she couldn't see him anywhere.

He'd commed her back once to let her know that he was alive, but was otherwise happy to let her worry from where she was positioned.

Han moved tables until he found one with a decent view of the back entrance to the khedive residence. A lifetime of backroom deals made it very apparent to him that the less-than-legal guests were rarely admitted - or left - through the front door. If they did, it was a way to let them walk straight into a blaster sight. The back door - in this case a nearly-invisible entryway obscured by the smooth stucco-like material that coated most buildings in Candobar - was a closely-guarded secret of the khedive residence ... one that was available to any tourist with access to a tour guide's pamphlet.

He ordered a drink and sat back to watch the door, ignoring a comm he received from somewhere near where Chewie was positioned. He was better off ignoring them than falling into the trap of their picked fights. He couldn't decide who was worse, Chewie or Leia.

A blurred movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. He turned his head in time to catch a glimpse of blue skin and glowing red eyes before the Chiss slid out of sight. Han stood up and crossed to bar, looking towards the back of the man's head, trying to decide if it was worth moving and compromising his stakeout.

A Chiss wasn't something to overlook. Not here, not anywhere.

It was his overwhelming feeling of ill-ease that propelled him to follow the Chiss, exiting the bar and moving to stand next to a group of vendors setting up shop outside the khedive residence. He looked left and right and couldn't catch a glimpse of blue, so he turned towards the rear of the imposingly tall building, hoping that the Chiss thought the same way he did: when you scared most humans shitless simply because of your species, it was necessary to take the back roads.

Han had dealt with a Chiss only once before, and it hadn't been a pleasant experience; he'd walked away feeling every scratch and bruise, almost proud to have walked away at all. It hadn't been a pretty sight. He swiped a hand along his forearm involuntarily, worrying an old, half-forgotten scar, then rolled his eyes at himself for being so distracted and refocused on finding the Chiss.

He'd reached the alley's mouth and looked left and right, but found absolutely nothing. He grimaced, then took a wild guess and headed left, dodging a rush of pedestrians as he half-jogged up the avenue. It was too crowded to see anything other than the constant flow of vendors and off-duty dry-dock employees, and he was walking upstream, into the mass of people. He quickly decided that he was going to get absolutely nowhere doing what he was doing, so he turned around and went back up the alley he had come from, taking his comm out and risking a call to both Leia and Chewie, giving them the basics of what he knew.

Though they protested, he jumped into the rented speeder and shut their voices off, hightailing it out of the congested shopping area and scouring the alley outlets. By the time he'd given up hope of catching the Chiss again, it was turning dark and his eyes felt dry from the dust that coated absolutely everything in sight. He growled in the back of his throat, annoyed and angry, a steady stream of curses issued from his lips. It wasn't so much that he'd _lost _the Chiss; it was more that he'd lost his one chance to see where the blue-skinned alien would lead him, which was infinitely more valuable that the person himself.

He wasn't here to hunt strange aliens.

_Shit, _he thought, and turned the speeder towards the assigned rendezvous point.

* * *

His hands beneath her shirt made it all seem a lot safer than it should have been. The incongruity of sex, of submission in the face of passion, had long ago given way to the indefinable way that he exuded confidence, to the heat beneath her skin, to the taste of his tongue as it traced the underside of hers. It was a mess of incongruities, the whole thing, and so she'd given up trying to understand the whys and focused on the way he felt beneath the crisp of his shirt.

She broke their kiss, moved her lips beneath his chin, and he tilted his head back as she ran her tongue up to his ear. "You," she said, as quietly as she could manage, because his hand was between her thighs and everything felt much warmer than it had a second ago, "you are driving me _insane."_

Her back pressed into a bulkhead before she could begin to wonder when he moved her, the line of his body pushing hard against hers. She was breathing too fast; it obscured the growl he made at the back of his throat. He got impatient, and her shirt was suddenly gone, and she tried pushing him back, but it did little to help her. She pressed both hands to him, near his ears, and pulled his head from her neck. "Somewhere soft, please."

He mumbled what she thought was, "Speak for yourself," but she let it go as he moved his body away enough for her to walk around him and drop to the bunk. Instead of following her, he moved to the other side, and flipped open the miniature communications display.

Leia was taken aback. "Han Solo," she began, but he was already back to her, the communications console dark once again. "What did you just do?"

"Checked something."

"Something." She repeated it to try and blast the idea into her head forever. "You stopped to _check something_?"

He had a strange look on his face, as if it were all glaringly obvious to everyone else and she had a blindfold over her eyes. "I _momentarily_ stopped to check something." He wrapped an arm around her waist as he laid down on his stomach beside her. "I wanted to make sure no one had decided to let us in on what's happening on Coruscant."

She was beyond bewildered. She'd assumed that Han's time in the military - his time as a commander _and _his time abiding by some form of the military code - would have instilled some smallish tendencies to decorum. In the few weeks he'd been back, she'd noticed the added sense of responsibility, but she'd also seen a great many moments of wild abandon, almost like he was rebelling from what he'd had to be for the past few years.

But _this ... _she wasn't sure whether to be concerned or to laugh uncontrollably. She settled for kissing his shoulder and smiling into his skin. "You felt like this was as good a time as any?"

He turned his face toward her and she scooted closer, the smell of his damp hair from his recent fresher messing with her head. "I'm assuming I'm going to have my hands full pretty soon," his hand traced a breast, "and if something was happening on Coruscant, I would've wanted to know so I didn't get my hopes up."

"I'm just – " she sat up. "_Oh._"

"Oh?"

"This is _Cracken." _She was starting to get angry; she could feel it coming, that tidal wave of red emotion, and she tried as hard as she could to dam it up before he caught wind of it. Princesses don't resort to fury. "Is your leash so tight that you have to check _now_?"

"My _leash _involves a couple of checks, yeah." He still looked confused, like he had no idea why he had to defend himself. Leia was a little fuzzy on the details, too, except that now she had something on him, and she was going to use it. "What's the big deal?"

"I just … I hadn't realized how far into this you'd gotten." She had a horrible thought, one she wasn't sure she could deal with right now, but she said it anyway, her defenses already crumbled and worn from the heat of his skin beneath her hands. "Did you sign the transfer? Is he giving you orders you have to follow?"

The confusion on his face snapped into blatant anger. "You think I'd _lie _to you about that?" He snorted, wiped a hand over his face. "Shit, Leia. You seriously think I'd try to hide that one from you?"

He was trying to make her feel ridiculous and she was far too worked up to go along with that. "I think you've done things like this before, only now it's something bigger that has consequences that reach beyond just you and _your ship."_

"Hold on a _fucking _minute here. Where the hell are you getting this? When have I ever lied to you?"

Her hold on the situation was tenuous at best, but her anger made her righteous. "You didn't tell me Cracken had asked you to join NRI."

"Neither did you."

After the volume of her comment, his seemed tinny and benign, though it held all the weight in the galaxy for Leia. They were still in bed and they hadn't moved; he was lying on his stomach with his face towards her, half obscured by the pillow, and she was twisted into his side, her leg wrapped around one of his, his arm still around her waist. What they were saying – and how they were saying it – were a completely separate reality from what how they were sitting, the picture of hard-won intimacy. The ridiculousness of that was appalling. _"I _didn't take him up on it."

"You never had to, did you?" His face held thirty-some odd years of self-denial in it, and her righteousness drifted away on the back of her dignity. "Sweetheart, if the situation was reversed, and you were being sent away for an unspecified amount of time on a mission that does exactly jackshit good for anyone and is doomed to fail, wouldn't you have taken Cracken up on his offer?"

There was a mountain of context to that question. She didn't have to answer it. "I don't know."

"You wouldn't have considered it? Leaving me for who knows how long for something that doesn't mean anything to you?"

"That's not what I meant."

"But you'd have to weigh the pros and cons, draw up a damn chart and see where the most benefit came out?" He sat up, still staring at her. "You really would have had to think about it, wouldn't you?"

She realized – very belatedly – what he was getting at. "You think my work means more to me than you do? Honestly? Are we having _that _conversation now?" She sat up too, disgusted with the idea.

"Don't be stupid. That's not what I said. I asked if you would genuinely have to think about the possibility of leaving." He grabbed her hand, held it up to his cheek. The warmth of his skin reminded her what they had been doing, about to do, and she couldn't believe how quickly it had spiraled away from where they had been. "Would you?"

She couldn't lie, even if she had wanted to. "Yes."

His face fell with all the grace of a drunken pilot. "Well, that changes things," he said, dropping her hand.

He rolled out of the bunk and threw on some clothes, exiting the room with a quiet hiss that seemed more sorrowful than any of his words could possibly convey. Leia felt too humiliated, too open to leave, so she sat there, naked, waiting for the realization to come to her that she didn't deserve the man that had just left. Instead, all she felt was the lingering scent of anger and her denial, and it occurred to her that, sooner or later, this wasn't going to be a simple fight. There was going to come a time when what he said and what she meant were going to be the same thing, and then it would really begin to hurt. Arguments in which both sides misunderstand each other were relatively easy to resolve. The ones in which everything is clearly laid out, where both people fully understand what is going on and the consequences of what they say … those were the ones that scarred and killed and destroyed.

Leia was genuinely frightened that they were at that point. The murkiness was getting thinner.

She sighed and huddled into the bedclothes, wondering if she should get up and get something done until the galaxy decided to stop screwing around with her life.

* * *

Han returned to the _Falc__on _three hours later without even the excuse of intoxication to blunt the memory of her words. He'd set up shop not thirty feet away, feeling the ache of hunger and the need to make sure no one paid Chewie or Leia any mind. The diner he'd sat in was sterile and boring and had a view of the spaceport docking bay #6225, and so he'd sat at a table, ordered and eaten, all without taking his eyes off his ship.

The fight annoyed him more than it made him angry; he was more hurt than anything. It wasn't what she said so much as how she said it, and the memory of her conflicted eyes as she tried to avoid his questions sucked out some of the optimism he'd been carrying around since they'd left Coruscant._ You're confused because she's upset about something you haven't done, _he thought. _And she's upset because she thinks she knows more than she does. _

The stupid thing was that he didn't think she knew what she thought she did.

Their relationship – hell, their entire lives – was way more complicated than what she was insinuating, and it was almost insulting to hear what she was saying.

_I think you've done things like this before, only now it's something bigger that has consequences that reach beyond just you and your ship._

_That _was insulting. To hear that she thought he would lie about something as stupid as him signing the transfer when he'd flat out said he hadn't … he punched in the access code to the _Falcon _and came aboard. He wondered at her assumption that he would feel the need to lie about something like that; he'd never really seen the benefit or appeal of lying to a woman, because they always figured it out and it was better to just buck up and accept whatever you had coming your way. Leia, in particular, was the kind of woman he would never consider lying to, because she was intuitive and intelligent and it'd be shit-faced crazy to try and get away with it. He'd never do that – not now, not ever.

He considered sleeping in the cockpit and then the crew quarters, but neither held much appeal and he'd rather get this argument off his radar as soon as he could. There were things he'd never admit to, even if prodded, and one of the more embarrassing ones was related to sleeping next to Leia: he found it much easier to fall asleep when her skin was _right there _and he'd rather deal with an irate Leia in bed than an empty, but righteous, bunk. So he walked towards his quarters, passing Chewie on the way. He teased his first mate lightly about his sleeping pattern, earned more than he gave and saluted the wookiee as he trumbled off to his bunk, images of a naked and relaxed Leia wound up in his head with the blue silk of his favorite dress of hers and the half-accepted knowledge that it was in her closet on Coruscant. He stepped through the hatch as it hissed open, took one look around, and decided that he was the most unlucky man in the entire galaxy to fall in love with a woman who could slip past both a wide-awake wookiee and a New Republic general who knew more than he should about illicit docking bays.

He didn't hesitate.

"Chewie," he yelled as he ran back through the main corridor to the outer hatch, passing his first mate on the way, "lock the hatch and you let _no one _through unless they can tell you what my mother's name was."

"What was your mother's name?" Chewie rumbled, confused but well aware that Han's apparent rush to leave was indicative of a big development.

Han was almost through the hatch before he said, "Jaina." He buttoned up the jacket he was wearing. "Lets go with Jaina." Then he rushed down the ramp and blurredly running to the tapcafe he'd visited earlier in an attempt to figure out where she'd gone.

He found her at a bar in the center of the city, the fourth such place he looked. He'd figured that she wouldn't be out doing nothing; she wasn't the type to need space when angry. What she'd need – and he'd _known _this, too, which is why he was furious at himself for thinking any differently – was to be productive in the best way she knew how. So, inevitably, she'd be somewhere they'd discussed as a possible information-gathering area, and she'd be sitting at the bar, taking in as much as she possibly could.

The bar was named _The Lucky Hand_, and he hated it before he'd even stepped inside.

He saw her immediately, like he had a Leia-radar built into his head, and she was nursing a bright green drink that he suspected she hated. She was wearing a simple flightsuit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail but her face screaming _something else _as loudly as it possibly could. He wondered if anyone else saw through her facade, saw her as the straight arrow he was looking for, but it didn't matter. He wasted no time; he headed towards her in a semi-straight line, knocked out of his intended path by an overly-amorous Gotal and a short-skirted waitress that called him 'honey'.

And then he spotted whom she sat next to.

He was as Imperial as someone could get, straight-backed with slicked hair and Han caught the slightly crisp note tagged to the end of his speech that identified him as a Coruscanti native and a Carida graduate. Han knew his type. The man was a career Imp, quiet and polite and deadly as anything, in or out of uniform. This wasn't a stormtrooper without his armor; this was an officer, and a dangerously educated one at that.

Han shuffled off to the side and sat down at the nearest empty table he could find with a decent view of Leia's part of the bar.

He was too far away to hear anything but his visual was pretty damn good: good enough to see the way the officer's mouth moved and the fraction of a centim he leaned towards Leia as he spoke to her. Han tried to read the man's lips but he was too far away and he wasn't even sure which language the man was using; Leia was fluent in a good too many to make that job a simple one. He spent the next fifteen minutes instead checking the rest of the clientele for the officer's buddies. If they were here they weren't as clear-cut as Leia's friend. He'd found what he thought was a spice deal in the back corner but nothing else of interest, so he switched his focus back to Leia and the Imp.

She was playing the new co-pilot role, he could tell after a few moments of watching her. It was a smart move on her part; as galaxy-wise as Leia was, she still radiated a sense of purity in a crowd like this that she'd have a hard time disguising. She'd be focusing on the skylanes and traffic, and a new hire would be the sort to ask their neighboring Imp about the lanes, possibly not even recognizing him for what he actually was. She wasn't offering him anything, Han could tell, because they made absolutely no physical contact and the officer made no advance toward her at all. Leia was facing the bar, but her head would incline towards the Imp every now and again, though he made no reciprocal movement towards her.

Their conversation was brief, lasting maybe six minutes after he'd entered the bar, and ending when the Imp stood up and turned to face Leia slightly, nodding, then moving away and leaving the bar altogether. Han exhaled and let his shoulders relax a fraction, figuring he'd follow her back to the _Falcon _or wherever she went next, surprising her with his presence sometime before she got back to the ship. He blinked to check his chrono, and when he straightened back up, his eyes bleary, she was sitting at his table, looking not at all worried and even a little smug.

"Hey, you."

If she thought he was going to let this whole thing slide, no matter what she'd found out, she was very, very mistaken. "You should look a little more ashamed right now."

She nodded. "I should. I don't. Sorry."

"No, you don't." He plopped his elbow onto the plastisteel of the tabletop, tucked his chin into his palm, trying for an exasperated look though aware he probably failed miserably. "You'd better have something good."

"I do. I have a rank." She stood up, spoke over her shoulder. "The rest I'll need to tell you in private."

* * *

Grand Admirals were things that you didn't lose track of. They had the singularly nasty habit of being one of the few ranks you couldn't achieve in the Empire by simply keeping your nose clean and being human and male. Grand Admirals were trouble, and they were also supposed to be dead.

Well, ten of them were dead. The other was under house arrest and hadn't done so much as lift a hand against anyone in two years.

And one was …. a rumor. A mystery. One they'd all heard of in that shady way that was unsubstantiated and like fog in its tendency to burn away quickly.

The Providential Council had decided that accounting for twelve known admirals out of the famed Council of Twelve wasn't a bad statistic at all, and hadn't even bothered to listen for any other interesting bits of information related to this mysterious _other._ Since this officer hadn't been seen or heard from in the four years since the Emperor's death, and since the Empire was under the illustrious leadership of a set of inane moffs and a few aggressive warlords, all of whom made a bigger deal out of things than a grand admiral would anyway, it hadn't seemed particularly important to search for a man that did not still exist.

It was, really, a matter of great importance … eventually.

But the council had much more pertinent things to worry about, after all, with the Krytos virus and Zsinj and elections and claiming Coruscant, and you had to believe in the sort of conspiracy theories that madmen pursued in order to be truly concerned about it.

It was inevitable, then, that this missing _other _would plan a trajectory back into the galactic scene just when the New Republic was busy celebrating itself, when the rebels had declared themselves legitimate and were beginning the long and dirty process of rewriting history, all snuggled up into their comfortable_ stable _capital, their worries more focused on member elections than on security and protection.

They now had the impossible job of proving the existence of a threat they couldn't _know about _from a man who didn't exist.

This was when Han Solo decided that it was time to stop screwing around with Airen Cracken.


	6. Chapter 6

Thank you, again, to those kind reviews - I appreciate every one of them I get and I thank you for your time. :)

* * *

They risked a potentially disastrous communiqué to Coruscant, even though Leia had adamantly argued against it. She decided that the next time she wanted Han to do something, she'd argue for the opposite; that seemed to be the only time she could get him to do what she wanted.

Han was hunched over the communications center, checking and cross-checking the comm traffic situation reports, Chewie sitting beside him, grumbling and roaring about the stupidity of the plan. Or, rather, Chewie was arguing without anyone denying what he was saying about the stupidity of this not-plan, because who the hell had a death wish so good they'd risk a comm call into the intelligence center of what was essentially a faux-blockaded world? Leia agreed and nodded. Han, apparently, didn't care who was bringing him the logical arguments; he hummed quietly to himself as he fiddled with the receivers.

"So when a hidden Imperial force ambushes the _Falcon _while we're sleeping, am I allowed to say all the things I'm dying to say to you right now?"

Han nodded. "That's fair." He tripped the receiver input and Leia heard the pitch of the frequency connection shift up a little. "If a hidden Imperial force ambushes the _Falcon _while we're sleeping, I doubt you'll get all of it out anyway."

She rolled her eyes, but then straightened her back as Han did, the frequency hitting a higher pitch and his fingers flying above the confirmation codes.

"Well, here we go," he said, stepping back and hooking his thumbs through his belt loops. "Solo to Cracken, am I coming through?"

There was a _pop _and then Cracken's voice shot through the communication center speakers. "Solo," he grunted. He sounded as displeased about this contact as Leia was.

"You're looking at a grand admiral on tour over here, Airen." Han flipped a switch and their carefully-organized data packaged was sent. "Take a look at that and tell me you don't love me."

There was a shuffle on the other end. "A thirteenth grand admiral." There was a thoughtful silence. "How accurate is this?"

"Well," Han looked at Leia, though Cracken wouldn't be able to see it. "Leia got friendly with an Imperial officer."

"Princess?"

She sighed. "He wasn't particularly talkative. I was asking him about spacelanes and he was telling me to avoid the Perlemian Trade Route. I asked him why, and he told me he couldn't say any more." She pursed her lips in memory. It'd been almost fun to play the innocent co-pilot role. "He was careful, and he assumed I wasn't intelligent enough to catch what he was actually saying."

She paused for a second, then said to herself. "He wasn't interested in me at all."

Cracken heard her. "Possibly had something to do with the ring on your finger." They looked down to the preemptive wedding ring on her left hand, bright as the sun on a Tatooine day. Leia flushed while Cracken continued on voice-only mode. "What did he say that pointed you toward a grand admiral?"

"He mentioned a long journey and scouting trips. Then I mentioned Zsinj's death to see if he would react. He didn't. But it was news to him."

"How could you tell?"

Really, it'd been a _feeling,_ but she wasn't about to admit that to Airen Cracken. "His eyes."

"What did he do next?"

She hopped up on the holotable behind her, almost at the same time as Chewie sat in the booth beside her. "He pressed for intelligence for awhile. It wasn't hard to figure out that he was also on a scouting run."

"The grand admiral?"

"Sent him, I think, though from the immediacy of his actions, I got the impression that the good admiral is _here _on a sort of scouting run himself."

"To see the shipyards, no doubt."

"To see what the galaxy looks like, I think. If the rumors are true and we're talking about a grand admiral that's been in the Unknown Region for at least four years …. He'd be suicidal to come back to known space without at least a foreknowledge of what he was walking into."

"This is all corollary evidence."

"It is until you piece it together with the data intel we got before the bar," Han answered for her. "I saw a Chiss male leave the khedive residence two days ago."

Cracken snorted. "Okay, look. What you're talking about is bordering on stupidity, and _I'm_ in the business of believing the impossible. Even ifwe believed that this thirteenth grand admiral exists – in which case the big question is _where has he been and why? _– there is absolutely no proof that he's alive. Or a Chiss. No _real _proof –" he spoke over Han as he protested this, " – outside of some old rumors that had been circulating before you were in the Imperial senate, Princess."

"It's_ something,_ isn't it? You wanted us here, you have us here."

"What I wanted was reality, Solo, and what you're giving me is rumor and possibilities that make no sense in the grand scheme of things." There was a sigh, then: "Next time you contact me, despite the obvious dangers, you better have some real intel or a plan of how to find some, or else I'll leave you there indefinitely."

Han laughed bitterly. "You can't do anything to me, Cracken."

"If you say so," the gravel-filled voice dripped menace. "Though, if I were you, I wouldn't trust that at all. You've seen what Intelligence is capable of, Solo."

The communiqué ended quickly with a quiet _click _and Chewbacca gave a strained grumble beside her, asking her if she thought Han had lost his mind.

"You've known him longer than me, Chewie," she replied, and walked out of the room.

* * *

Han spent the next day attempting to find the Chiss again, and so Leia was left to her own devices, attempting to do something productive without straying too close to where Han was positioned. The was partly because of mission security - two agents in the same place meant two dead agents if anyone figured it out - but mostly, Leia thought, it was because they were at that point where seeing each other would spiral them into annoyed bickering, so they kept their distance.

She knew it was the wrong thing to think, but she couldn't help blaming most of it on Han. His stupid and reckless decision to trust Airen Cracken was article number one on her official 'Things He's Responsible for Doing Wrong' list, and she'd known, since the moment he'd announced his plan to join NRI, that Cracken had had something up his sleeve. What infuriarated her _more _was that Han was no trusting soul - he knew as well as she did that people like them simply couldn't trust a man like the good general.

And he had still gone ahead.

Leia sighed and uncrossed her legs, the dust from the street in front of her gritting the exposed skin of her knees. She sat outside in what was supposed to be a quaint tapcafe, but the service was horrendous and she could see absolutely _nothing. _Chewie had suggested it as a good survellience area and she saw why he had: it was half a kilometer out of the normal traffic lanes, yes, but it also happened to be located in a quarter of town that was often visited by mid-level politicians. Though she wasn't convinced that they should be wasting time trying to hunt down a Chiss simply because of his species, she always had it in the back of her mind that if she were a mid-level politician, she would be working _any _potential ally hard.

That was, perhaps, why Leia had never managed to be a mid-level politician.

Something flickered in the corner of her eye; she turned her head. It was the glint of sunshine hitting a helmet's comm receiver, the light stinging her eyes. She watched disinterestedly, having already spotted two such helmets. The helmeted man walked out of sight, another one shuffling behind him, then another, and another and .... she started paying attention. They weren't walking in any sort of formation, but they had the air of recent action about them, carbon scoring on a couple of the chest plates, one now walking past without a shin plate.

Curious.

She stood up and quickly paid the bill. She wasn't sure she'd found anything truly exciting, but it beat wasting her time here. She ran up to the cross street, where the haphazard parade was winding past. A small crowd had formed between her and the line of helmeted men, and she used her slight frame to squeeze past people and even resorted to squatting at one point to get past a pair of Sluissi.

They weren't stormtroopers, she thought. It looked like a rough assortment of civilians, though, of course, she couldn't be sure. They were shaped like humans, and the closer she looked the more careworn their armor appeared to be. It was glinting off the dusty sun's rays, but some pieces were mangled or punctured.

Whoever they were, they didn't belong here.

She pressed against the crowd on either side of the parade, trying to get to the back as the flow moved _with _the soldiers. It took her ten minutes to brave the flood until suddenly it was clear and the massive group was behind her. She looked over her shoulder at the throng, caught a hint of blue skin and stared.

_There is no way,_ she thought, until a hand curled around her bicep and hauled her down _hard. _

A pair of blaster bolts flew over head, and she turned to see Han ducking protectively over her. She caught a glimpse of his eyes, staring at the same place she had seen the Chiss, before he hissed, "We have to go." He stood up, tugged on her arm again, this time towards the alley to their right. "We have to go _now."_

She followed him down the alley way, though no one fired on them again until they reached the next crossing street. She ducked low and continued to run, her legs already screaming at her to stop. She was about to comment to Han that they couldn't keep running from their assailants, because, eventually, one of them would be in the wrong place at the wrong time - they needed to leave the area right now.

_No! _She screamed at herself._ I just confirmed Han's theory! _Logically, the thing to do would be to get back to the other street, get lost in the crowd, and take a holo of the Chiss. "Han - " she started to say, but he wasn't paying attention to her. He was focused on an airspeeder across the street from them; she had to pull him back to miss the latest barrage from their attackers.

He let go of her hand and sped towards the passenger side door, jumping in and blasting the console in front of him. She followed him, but stepped into the driver's seat, uncomfortable but knowing what he needed. Once he hotwired the thing, she needed to get them out of there as soon as possible. He frantically twisted wires, and Leia looked for the people shooting at them, searching for ways to cover herself from the shots and finding little in the way of shelter except for the backs of the seats. She hunched down and made sure Han was too and prayed silently that their shooters weren't above them, where the shots would be much clearer.

Obviously, they were in luck. The blasterfire continued but nothing reached over the high seats, and her heart was steadying when Han yelped out a curse, fusing two wires together with his index finger and thumb. She waited until he gave her the go ahead - a loud "Go!" - before she shoved the speeder into gear. It gave a half-hearted _clunk, _then chugged up and held steady. She took a breath, tried to relax her shoulders, and then accelerated as fast as the thing would go, zipping through the street and careening away from their shooters.

"Where do you want me to go?" She asked, her voice barely audible from the scream of the wind blowing her hair - and her words - behind her. She briefly wondered if he could hear her, cushioned in the back seat, facing towards the rear of the speeder, the BlastTech cocked and aimed and ready to go.

"Just don't _hit _anything," he said, never moving his head, his voice loud.

"Shavit," she murmured, refocusing on the path in front of her and swerving to miss a pedestrian that dawdled in the waning sunlight. She gripped the yoke tightly, and hunched her head and her shoulders up to protect her ears. Her hair was flying all over the place; Leia thought it was the same as painting a giant target over the transparent blastshield in front of her and wished she had tied it back.

She kept accelerating, pushing the motivator _hard. _It whined in protest, the sound mixing with the shouts and yelps of people walking the streets. Up ahead was the beginning of a marketplace, and Leia was completely unwilling to be chased into a tiny alley with lots of potential casualties around. She checked the scanner in the dashboard next to her right wrist, saw no immediate open alley, and she panicked for a second before the resolve born of a hundred chases exactly like this one calmed her down.

She tilted the yoke towards her, and the nose of the speeder inched up. There was another _clunk _as the speeder protested the pressure change; she dialed down the heat accelerator and prayed nothing would short-circuit.

A loud _whump _sounded behind her, and Leia knew their pursuers had found their own speeders. She thought she heard Han muttering to himself, but she couldn't be sure, so she ignored it and gripped the yoke harder. The heat accelerator was slowly dialing down, but as the climb continued, it slowed down further, so that Leia seriously wondered if they would overheat or combust at the apex of the climb.

She chanced a look behind her and to the sides. She was even with the third level of residences, well above the vendors and normal air traffic, but not nearly as high as she wanted to be. There were terraces and balconies to consider -

The left side of the speeder dipped down as a laser blast hit it, and Leia fought with the yoke to keep the speeder steady. The climb obviously wasn't going to work, she thought, so she started minor evasive maneuvers to prevent any more damage being done to the speeder. It seemed to work for the time being, though Han was shouting at her to lay off so he could get a clear shot. She kept ignoring him, determined to keep _some part _of them in good condition.

Something burned past her right ear, and Leia instinctively ducked, keeping her eyes above the panel in front of her, but leaning over to the right. She flipped the speeder on its side, a loud curse accompanying it as Han was thrown into the side of the speeder, his hands leaving the blaster momentarily.

"What the _hell _are you doing up there?" He yelled, his voice a short crack in the loud _hum _of the speeder.

"Do you _want _to be plastered on the side of a wall?" She yelled, but she knew he wasn't really listening, because the blaster retained its loud _whumping. _Leia checked the controls again, stopped the climb, then dove down into an accompanying avenue, bereft of potential casualties, but much, much darker and narrower than she expected. "Hold tight," she murmured.

Han must've heard her; she heard him curse under his breath.

The dive took them to the second-story level, then the base floor, then to a bare skim across the rough-hewn patch of dust on the street. Their pursuer followed up higher, sacrificing speed for shooting advantage, but Leia quickly decelerated and they shot past her, whipping their blasters at her as she amped back up, trying to get Han back in range of their speeder. He had turned and was shooting upwards over her head, and a continuous set of laser blasts wove past her cheek. She ducked again; they were still higher - at the second-story - and still in front of her, and the alley narrowed down so much that only one speeder could pass at a time. She shrugged her shoulders up and kept them ahead of her, wary that they might try to pull the same trick on her as she had them.

"Leia," Han's voice came from behind her. "Climb again."

She was sorely tempted to look at him. "_Climb?"_ She said instead, never taking her eyes of the speeder ahead of them. "There's no way I'm letting you jump onto it."

"That's not what I - " he stopped as a blaster bolt cut through the air behind her head. Han stood up - she heard the creak of the nerfhide leather - and shot upwards. There was a dizzying sense of danger before her hands automatically swung the speeder over to the left, hugging the building, as a human figure fell to her right.

"Warn me next time!" She yelled, but he'd settled down and wasn't going to answer her. She sighed, then started to climb, slowly, so that it wasn't apparent to the other speeder what was happening. They were coming close, she sensed it without even looking, and everything around her was blurring as both speeders accelerated. _We could decelerate and get out of here,_ she thought, then grimaced to herself at the stupid thought. If their attackers hadn't identified them yet, they would shortly after they retreated.

The blaster bolts aiming for _her _were getting closer to the mark; Leia couldn't raise a blastshield without leaving Han no space to shoot, so she bunched down and concentrated on juking past the roaring waves of balconies and launch pads as best as she could.

"Up! Go up!" Han said, and Leia obeyed, ticking the acceleration down a bit and nosing up. She braved a glance behind her and saw him standing up, his hands outstretched, a thermal detonator in his hand. She had a moment of panic when she realized what he intended.

"Han!" She screamed, the yoke still pulled slightly towards her. "Non-aggressors!"

He didn't even turn towards her. "Better them than us."

Leia was frantic. Lofting armed detonators into speeders was one thing; doing it with private _residents _around was cutting their losses a little too much. She thought, hard. "Wait until we clear the lane, then do it. Collateral damage is too great here."

He was still standing, though he looked down at her. "You're following _them,_ Sweetheart."

She narrowed her eyes, shot him the angriest glare she had. "Sit down, shut up and let me figure this out."

He opened his mouth to disagree, but what came out was a muffled _oof _as she accelerated hard enough to tumble him down onto the back seat. She would have grinned, except she was concentrating exclusively on the control panel in front of her, willing the speeder to move _faster _with every thought she had. The speeder groaned and the accelerator gauge ticked up again - with the heat gauge reciprocating. She knew what that meant. If she wanted to go _faster,_ she had to cool off the thrusters. If they burned out, there wasn't a force in the galaxy that could save them from capture.

"Han!" She yelled, turning her head minutely to get his attention. "Get up here!"

His hand came first, waving frantically at the seat in an effort to not lose his grip on the handle he had found. He grunted, then pulled himself over the seat, straining to hold on with the wind whipping past him. After he was safely over the seat, she gestured to the control panel. "We need speed and not heat." She glanced at him, tried to shake her hair out of her eyes. "Can you do that?"

"Can I - " His eyes widened. "You want me to play with coolant while we're running hot like this?"

"I want you to do what you're supposed to be _good _at."

"I'm _good _- " he muttered, as he threw his elbow into the control panel, lifting bits of cracked plastisteel away as it fell off the wiring, " - at doing what you're doing, woman." He grunted as something snapped and sizzled, drawing his hand away. "Pull over and let me fly."

"Sure," she said, jinking back and forth as they started to inch in front of their pursuit. "Let _me_ play with the coolant. I'm sure - " she gritted her teeth as another shot went by her ear. An unbidden image of a successful shot hitting her shoulder ran through her head; she almost let go of the yoke, thinking it had happened. She gripped it all the harder, and threw the image out of her mind, focusing on keeping the enemy concentrating on _her _and not Han, who was twisting wires out of the way to reach a container that smelled hideous, his fingers prying the lid off.

She was trying to keep them steady, figuring out where they could go next, what they could do to keep their pursuit distracted while Han tapped into the container and looped a rag around his fingers, when she felt a blast of heat at her right shoulder. At first she felt nothing but shock and, though she knew what had happened, she didn't look at it. Then it started to burn, the skin pealing off in waves, the shock of the blaster shot sending arches of pain up and down in droves, and in seconds she was gritting her teeth and fighting nausea. She didn't want to see it, didn't want to risk looking at it, didn't want to distract Han because the temperature gauge kicked up _again _and if he didn't get the old coolant feed to stop overheating, much worse was going to happen. She fought against it, fought against the rising tide of over-stimulation, not sure if she was being successful or not. Her eyes stung, unshed tears rimming, but she clamped her teeth onto her bottom lip and tried to keep the hiss in her throat inaudible.

She succeeded, for the most part, breathing deeply and trying to keep her eyes open wide enough to see the lane ahead. The narrow alley was opening up, feeding into a heavier thoroughfare, and it was so very important that she keep them straight. Her right arm, the one that she was feeling with such abundant _pain _that, were she not running for their lives, she would've screamed, was useless on the yoke, so she shifted it down into her lap, clenching her abdominal muscles in an effort to forestall the cry ready in her throat. Her left hand wrapped around the yoke, keeping it as steady as she could, her trembling masked by the blaster assault that was slowly combing backwards, towards the seat behind her.

She looked over. Han's head was near her thigh, his right arm completely engulfed in the broken control panel, his face twisted in concentration. "That - " he grunted, sliding his hand out, his face not in the least bit reassuring. "That _should _do it."

Leia wished she could say something to him, but the retort died before she even really considered it. Han was counting back from five, mumbling about circuits and coolant rods, until he said "Go!" and then Leia's world was a flash of bright light and the air around her condensed and shuddered as the speeder bucked. The impact of her shoulder against the back of the seat triggered her voice, and she heard herself say Han's name before the whole thing went dark and the pain wiped the universe red, then black, then a peaceful shade of white.

* * *

_"Leia,"_ she heard, and it took her a second to recognize the name as hers. "C'mon, Sweetheart, I need you to wake up – "

She jerked, fully awake, the process jolting her shoulder and almost sending her back to unconsciousness before she could buck down and hold onto it with all the resolve she had left. Her eyes opened but her vision was blurry; she relied on her other senses to tell her where she was and how she was moving without actually moving anything. By the proximity of his voice and the arms under her back and knees, she figured Han was holding her, moving quickly because the wind was whipping her hair around. She groaned, her mouth dry and her throat parched, and her shoulder was throbbing with greater intensity as the moments passed. She tried blinking her eyes open again, clearing the watery film.

"Han," she said, her vision already improving. His face swam into view, looking angry and more than a little frightened, his eyes set in that torrentially possessive look that he reserved for her and his ship when either were in danger of giving out on him.

"_Ah,_" he said, and he tugged her closer. "You're up." He was breathing hard; she could hear his heartbeat under the fabric of his shirt. "I don't suppose you're awake enough to do your share?"

Of course she was; she motioned for him to stop and put her down. Her knees buckled momentarily but she held onto his arm and, after a few moments, she was able to hold herself up. Her legs felt weak and fluid and tingly, but she focused on them to ignore her shoulder. She walked after Han, her hand in his, half-cognizant of where they were heading, how alien the surroundings looked.

"Where are we going?" she asked; her voice was soft and the words were slightly slurred.

"Chewie's still with the _Falcon. _I'm hoping they haven't connected us with it." He breathed heavily. "I'm looking for somewhere to check out your arm."

"No, don't," she said. "It's just a graze."

He gave her a look that clearly told her he knew she was lying and sped up, his hand tightening in hers. "You don't faint when it's just a graze."

She scowled, the pain in her shoulder doubling for a split second as she tried to shrug, with awful consequences. "I don't _faint, _period."

"Whatever," he said, then pulled her hand to direct her inside a building to their left, the lobby of what looked like a moderately shabby hotel. She leaned against his shoulder as he spoke with the desk clerk, her left hand sliding across the small of his back, and she resisted the urge to hide her face in the folds of his jacket. She was feeling overly tired and a little too suspicious; the combination was not a good one. It felt like hours before the clerk affixed Han's fingerprint into the database, gave him the number of a room, and he moved away from the desk, her feet dragging behind her. She stayed awake long enough to reach the lift, then lost consciousness somewhere between then and when they got to the room.

* * *

Han Solo returned to the hotel room, his arms full of basic, on-the-shelf medical supplies, only an hour after he had deposited Leia onto the smallish bed and cleaned her shoulder as thoroughly as he could manage with water and a clean rag he'd ripped from the old-fashioned towels in the refresher cubicle. When he returned, she had shifted onto her left side, huddled in the thin blankets, her hair a brown mess on the pillow and her cleaned shoulder gleaming in the lights above her.

He put the supplies on the table next to the bed, and knelt beside her, touching the frayed skin and trying to keep his anger in check. It was much more difficult than he thought it would be; he was proud of himself for having even this much control.

Sighing, he reached for the bacta solution, still frustrated that he hadn't found precisely the concentration he'd wanted. Over-the-counter bacta was less potent, meant for small wounds and surface abrasions; what Leia had, an unmitigated blaster wound, required a much stronger solution than he was able to find in the area. He knew it was just a matter of cleaning it more often, of dressing and redressing it, but it annoyed him that he couldn't take care of her _right now._

She muttered in her sleep, said his name, and he stopped for a second, resting his head on her back, between her shoulder blades. An image of Leia with a small, coin-sized hole between her eyes sprung to mind. He didn't live in hypotheticals, but sometimes the 'what-ifs' became too real; he usually just shoved them back where they belonged.

He went back to work, wrapping her shoulder up and pressing as much gauze as he could stand to her wound. He cleaned up the mess he'd made on the table, then took off his shirt, stashed his blaster under the pillow, and laid down, crooking his knees behind hers and resting his right hand over the smooth skin of her stomach. He pressed his lips behind her right ear, careful not to put any pressure on her shoulder, and let her warmth and her presence calm the cyclone anger that was spreading like waves from deep in his chest.

Han Solo didn't live in hypotheticals. But just in case, he muttered, more to himself than to her, because he knew she couldn't hear: "You _ever _scare me like that again and I swear, Leia, I'll ..."

He left the thought unsaid and, exhausted, let Leia's skin serenade him to sleep, the feeling of her body right next to his, living and breathing, reassuring him with every breath she took.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7: In which Madam Author tears her hair out and hides her face from embarrassment.

* * *

Leia awoke facing the east wall of a hotel room she couldn't remember entering.

She shifted to her side quickly and felt the burning tear of an open blaster wound on the shoulder she was currently pressing into the bed. She cursed and moved to her other shoulder, hiking up the covers to her chin as she did so. From this angle, she could see Han at a holonet port in the next room and the painful details of her last conscious moments swam into focus.

_Ugh_, she thought, leaning away from her shoulder and trying to look at the damage. It wasn't terribly deep and had obviously been cared for - she could smell the bacta solution - but she was completely unwilling to write it off.

Blaster shots _hurt_, damn it.

She flexed her hand, and tried to stretch all the way through her toes, sitting up and taking stock. The hotel room looked hospitable enough, and it was tucked in an alcove where the windows looked straight out towards the walls of the building next door, which stood less than twenty feet away. It meant that, although they had no visibility, they were safe from snipers or other friends ... through the window, at least.

She exhaled through her teeth, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and taking a moment to steady herself. With a quiet huff, she stood and padded towards Han, his back to her. He was completely focused on the screen in front of him and didn't notice her approach.

"So," she said, and was proud of herself for startling him. "I'm not flying point for you in speeder chases anymore."

He turned completely around in his seat, then stood up and crossed over to where she was leaning against the wall. He murmured under his breath as he checked her shoulder, lifting the bandaging and pressing down along the edges. "Well, _I_ don't want to get shot."

"Better you than me," she said, shrugging him off and using his arm to stable herself as she moved towards the kitchenette. "What day is it?"

"Same day, just a little later. Here," he said, as he reached up past her head and grabbed the bowl she was trying to reach. "You were out of it for about, oh, five hours." He slid the bowl over and began filling it with things she wasn't sure she recognized out of a cabinet that looked hardly sturdy enough to hold a loaf of bread. She watched him finish with a flourish, and she moved to sit at the rickity table, Han sitting right beside her.

"What I don't understand," she began, "was _who_ was shooting at us."

Han leaned back in his chair, his hands resting lazily on the table in front of him. "Yeah. That's my question, too."

_And what you were working on when I woke up, too, I take it._ "What do you know?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Well, that's helpful." She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Chewie's okay?"

"Chewie's fine. Nobody's around over there." He ran a hand over his face. "The goal is to keep it that way."

_So that when we need to leave, we can,_ she thought. Sometimes she frightened herself; she could practically read the man's mind. _It's only scary when I guess the things that even he wouldn't say out loud._ He kept looking at her with one eyebrow raised, leaning back against the cusion of his chair. She was eating and he was staring at her like he thought she would get up and try to escape at any moment; it was one of his personal quirks. She knew he paid more attention to her than he should, and sometimes he put her on edge. "What?"

"What what?"

She took a mouthful out of the bowl, chewed, and looked back at him. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

He stood up, offered her a tentative smile. "You're eating," he said.

And that was it. No further explanation, no elaboration. It was this quality, this vague sense of possessiveness, that charmed and confused her. He would periodically do - or say - things like this, and it always threw her off: this nonchalant ownership of_ her_, and she never knew whether to be offended to be _someone else's_ or to feel protected and safe.

She'd once confronted him about it, years ago, back when she hadn't known everything there was to know about him, when she started discussions kindly and with reserve. She'd asked him why he insisted on taking her elbow when they walked together in a crowd. He'd looked at her like she was insane. She'd insisted; it had never made sense to her. Like clockwork, his hand would latch on her elbow, pulling her closer to his chest.

He hadn't answered her then, but she'd figured it out. Slightly. She understood that it wasn't a Corellian custom, it was him, and so she usually just offered it up as one more thing she'd have to learn to deal with.

"So. Our plan?"

He turned back to her. "We need the Chiss."

"Right," she said. "Or, rather, we need evidence that he's here. We may not be able to actually get him."

He nodded. "I have Chewie watching the local newsreports, though he hasn't heard a word about a Chiss military commander parading around here."

She sighed. _Things are never that easy._ "He won't find anything. Not if it's the missing grand admiral."

"Yeah," Han said, moving past her and kissing the top of her head as she ate from the bowl. "What do you think counts as evidence? Besides him strapped to a gurney?"

"You mean, what will the Senate accept as proof?" She waited for his nod, then set the bowl on the table. "We'd need at the very least a holo, a voiceprint, and possibly something attaching him to a known Imperial ship or captain."

"What would be ideal?"

She thought about it. "Him, strapped to a gurney."

He sighed. "Paperwork-wise ..."

"A communique between him and someone else should be enough paperwork," she said. "Voiceprint verifies identity, holo verifies where he is."

"A voiceprint verifies identity if the identity is known," Han said, rolling his eyes. "We don't even really know the guy's real name. And we just got shot at for no good reason, so it's an easy bet he's aware he's got someone watching for him."

_If the shooters were from him in the first place._ "Right."

They became quiet. Leia was thinking about politicians, the web-like net that connected everyone to everyone else somehow - even if that connection was one transaction tucked safely away where no one else would find it.

"What about Teradoc?"

Han looked at her and tilted his head. "We have no proof they're connected."

"They may not be, really. But the timing is not coincidental. Teradoc is Imperial; his agenda would be on their network, on their committees."

"Not necessarily," Han said. "Zsinj's operations were need-to-know; we never got anything out of Shadowcast or anywhere else. We tried it, at the Gravan system, and look where that got us. If they're black ops - "

" - nothing is going to connect them. Not where we could see it." She sighed. "This isn't making me feel any better about being here."

"We've both seen him."

"We both saw a Chiss male. There is nothing in what I saw, at least, that proves he's an Imperial grand admiral. In fact, the only true Imperial connection we have here, at Sluis Van, was the officer I talked to in the bar. And he didn't give much away." She pushed the bowl away from her and went to stand up. "I'm done and I'm going to get in the shower because I'm not ready to be brilliant yet."

"Wait." He sat down across from her, heavily. "Wait."

She continued to stand up, paying him absolutely no attention. "What?"

"Our objective is not to prove that our Chiss Grand Admiral is back and ready to go. Our objective is to prove that he _exists."_ She nodded and he continued, his eyes narrowing, but the excitement in them growing. "There's nothing we have, no resource, that gives us any real information on the Council of Twelve. The only people who know are the people who were in the Council to begin with."

"And they're all dead."

"Except Grant."

_'Except Grant' was right_, Leia thought. Grand Admiral Grant was the kind of man the Emperor had been dying to promote when he joined the Imperial Navy. Grant had been rash but intelligent, abrasive and gloating, but not overly ambitious and entirely self-serving. He hadn't left the Battle of Endor with much, so he found a nice little hole to hide in until the other grand admirals had been killed. Then he came out with striking evidence for the existence of an Imperial database and network scheme within the Rebellion and bargained with it for a peaceful retirement somewhere on the luxurious world of Rathalay. "Grant's already given us everything he knows in exchange for immunity. If there was a thirteenth grand admiral, he would've told us."

"Unless he's the specious prick we know him to be. Would he even consider a Chiss grand admiral a grand admiral?"

It was a good question. "Probably not."

"There you go."

Leia sighed. _There you go_ was Han Solo's way of choosing the most dangerous and illogical course of action possible, full of death threats and plasma explosives and big giant blasters aiming for the brainstem. While she wasn't sure how contacting a retired Imperial grand admiral could result in any of those things, she was certain that if anyone could manage it, it was the man sitting right in front of her, waggling his eyebrows.

"You're going to get yourself killed," she said.

"Well," he stood up and walked around his chair, slamming it into the table harder than needed and smiling handsomely, "It's my turn for daring heroics."

* * *

"Grant," she opened, smiling placidly like the kind gentlewoman she was supposed to be. "My name is Leia Organa."

"Pleased to make your acquiantance, Your Highness." The former grand admiral's gray eyes sweeped the whole of the screen, and Leia wondered if Han was sufficiently out of view. "How may I help you?"

"Information."

He squinted. "I thought that was assumed."

"I'm interested in the Council of Twelve."

"I've already done a fairly large debriefing on the Council, Princess. If it's not in the report you have lying in front of you, I'm not sure I'll be able to help."

His voice was smooth, cultured; he was the very essence of a Tapani nobleman, and she was considering whether or not to put him on her current list of 'People Leia Organa Will Never Ever Trust'. "Was there, or wasn't there, a thirteenth grand admiral?" She glanced down, as if she were reading from something below her. "A non-human grand admiral?"

His eyes narrowed, the only indication that she'd flustered him. "The Council of Twelve was not inaccurately named. There were twelve grand admirals."

"And a Chiss."

He puckered his lips, looking for all the galaxy as if he were preparing to kiss the screen in front of him. "The Chiss was never a part of the Council."

She sucked in her breath. "What was his name?"

"Thrawn," he said. "That wasn't his given name. The full thing was too long to pronounce."

She was tempted to roll her eyes. "Was he appointed publicly?"

Grant looked slightly shocked, like she'd slapped him across the face. "Publicly?" He snorted. "Thrawn was never 'publicly' anything. He was inevitably the Emperor's dirty secret. Useful, oh, yes. Very useful. But a secret nonetheless."

"How useful?"

"Thrawn was good enough at strategy to win the Emperor's favor. He conducted himself well on a few tours and wound up with a command equal to that of a grand admiral."

"Was he or wasn't he a grand admiral?" She was tired of repeating herself.

Grant looked to the side lazily, as if he wanted a distraction. "He was a useful strategist. A secret. The kind of weapon that the Emperor collected to assure no one else could have him." He returned his gaze to Leia's, smirking. "You may think all you like about the Emperor's evilness, his dark soul and his unprovoked attacks and all that, but he's not really fading away, is he?"

Leia switched tactics. "After the Battle of Endor, where did Thrawn go?"

"He was already assigned a mission none of us were privy to."

"From the Emperor."

"Yes."

"Does anyone else know what that mission entailed?"

He rolled his eyes. "No, Princess, I don't know what he was doing."

_"Was?"_

"Oh," he said, interest finally creeping into his voice. "Oh, I see. You think Thrawn is alive."

She didn't take the bait. "Do you have any information on his whereabouts at the time of the Battle of Endor?"

"No."

"Do you know the name of his flagship?"

"No."

"Do you know of any living officer that flew under his command?"

His eyes drooped lazily. "All I can tell you is that you would know if Thrawn was still around. He was the kind of commander that you'd remember, if you saw him. Remarkable mind, fantastic strategy, terrible execution."

She cocked an eyebrow.

"Thrawn was sloppy. He misjudged things. He was insufficiently prepared for the level of command he received."

Leia considered this. _Sloppy _was not the typical adjective for a Chiss. From what she'd always read and heard, the Chiss were infinitely logical, almost to a fault; they bred warriors and pilots like their spacial talents and mathematical skills grew from the ground. The Corellians had produced some of the best pilots in the galaxy - Han and Soontir Fel and Wedge Antilles - but the Chiss were in a class of their own.

Describing a Chiss military commander as _sloppy_ - one whom the Emperor considered enough to grant assignments worthy of a grand admiral - told her much more about Grant than it did Thrawn.

"Thank you. If I have any more questions, I'll contact you," she said, sure she would have to at some point.

Grant gave a funny squint, his eyes narrowing. "If you've got something for me, let me know. _If _Thrawn's alive, and_ if_ you find him, and _if _you decide to go after him, let the New Republic know I'm all for the fight." He smiled, his narrowed eyes making the look unsettling. "I'd pay for a chance to eliminate whatever fleet he might have cobbled up."

She stopped, her hand extended toward the comm termination switch. "Why do you say that?"

He smiled demurely. "Princess, if there's one thing I despise, it's unneccessary people." He flicked a piece of dust from his shoulder. "Thrawn was ... a frivilous being. An Imperial joke. I'd consider it a matter of honor to remove him from the galaxy." He reached for his own termination switch, then paused and grinned at her. "_If_ he's alive, of course."

The screen went blank and Leia blew out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

"Well," Han spoke up from across the room. "Grant just confirmed it."

"He didn't confirm it in a way that will hold up in front of Cracken." She put her head in her hands, the pulse behind her eyes pounding. "We know that Palpatine had a Chiss around named Thrawn, that he was a good tactician."

She left the rest unsaid, because she knew he knew what she'd say. They had no proof that Thrawn was ever appointed as an Imperial grand admiral, and also no solid base to say that the Chiss both of them had seen was the same Chiss that Grant wanted to destroy.

"So we're back to visual confirmation and voiceprints," Han said. "If we can find any. If Grant was against Thrawn's appointment - if he was indeed appointed - chances are the Emperor never added his information to the general Imperial records."

"Which means we have nothing to compare them with."

He nodded. She sighed and stood up, feeling her body's natural instinct to tense up, to protect her wounded shoulder, and struggling to keep it from her face. There are things Leia Organa hoped she'd never have to deal with ever again - blaster wounds to non-critical areas of her torso was near the top of the list. She'd handled the Endor wound poorly, wincing and talking in her sleep and such. In this day and age - four years after that wound had closed - she couldn't afford to do anything to get Han's protective instinct up. She had to bear this like the seasoned soldier she had been, with all the grace of the politican she was now.

She walked over to the pantry-shelf, a lower one than the one in which Han had found her breakfast, and hunted around for a muscle relaxant that wouldn't put her to sleep or impair her physically. "Our best bet," she reached into the shelf, found something she thought could work, "is to establish that there is an Imperial presence here. After that, we need to prove that our friendly local Chiss is a part of it." _Or leading it,_ she thought.

"Chewie's checked the port logs."

"If Imperials are here and if they're keeping a low profile - and we know they are because we haven't caught them here at all - they wouldn't be in the port logs." She tilted her head back and swallowed the relaxant, taking a proffered glass of water from Han. She walked back over the table, rested her hands on the back of the seat she'd been sitting on and handed Han the glass.

"Where do you want to look, then?" He asked, standing, too.

She moved towards him, put her hands on his neck, standing on her tip toes. Even then she wasn't as tall as him; it was increasingly inconvenient that the man she'd fallen in love with had to duck his head to even kiss her forehead. "I'm going to suggest something, and I want you to try to keep an open mind."

He pulled a face, but didn't say anything, probably anticipating that he would lose the argument anyway.

She smiled and tugged on his neck so she could kiss him quickly, sweeping against his lower lip and reveling in the comfortable feeling of his arms tightening around her waist.

When she stepped back, he looked mollified against his better judgment, his eyes still wary but the corners of his mouth turned up. "Fine. But I want to be the one getting shot this time." He sighed and turned away, towards the bedroom. "You got a lot more sleep than I did."

* * *

A library.

A goddamn _fucking_ library.

Han tried not to look furious at Leia as she slinked through the door. It was hard to do, because she was currently fulfilling one of his personal fantasies without focusing on him in the slightest. This had something to do with their grand admiral, he knew, but the rest of it was a blur because she had tried to explain her plan to him while she was dressing.

Han Solo had enough experience with sex and women to know that you don't show when you're turned on, unless you know for sure that the feeling is reciprocated. If you say something - or do something or touch something - you're more likely to be turned down and be called a typical male. If you stay quiet and try to pay attention, you have a chance.

With Leia ... well. Leia was a perceptive woman. If he insinuated something, she picked it up. He wasn't sure if this was because she was Leia or because they'd been together for too long. It all meant that she could read him like a pro. The thing with Leia, though, was that she was also responsive, meaning when she picked up what he was thinking, it wouldn't be long before she wound up there, too.

So how the hell she had missed the fact that he was sore and _wanted_ her was beyond him. She'd come back from a quick look at the clothing store beside the hotel - something he'd been adamantly opposed to her doing, imagining the shooting and the running and he was kind of tired of both at this point - with a wrap around skirt that went past her knee and a deep blue shirt that did nothing to dissuade him from his current condition. She'd been worried about being recognized so she'd added a pair of old glasses that she'd found stashed at the bottom of the closet in their room, which he didn't _get_ until he saw the final product, with her hair pulled back and the barest sheen of something on her lips. She'd had trouble with shoes, she said, until she'd seen a pair she'd liked on the woman staying down the hall from them. Leia'd offered her enough credits to glaze over the woman's eyes, then strapped them to her feet and worked on telling him what to do.

She'd looked buttoned up and private and ... hell.

His part of the plan involved a lot of watching, because both of them knew her shoulder hurt more than she'd let on and that her shooting arm was next to useless for the next few days. So he'd been ordered to sit at a wide-rimmed table near the archivist's office, datapads surrounding him on the table and his head in his hands as he tried to think of something other than the taste of her neck.

He hated it when she did this to him.

He searched around for things to occupy him, settling on his awkwardly-positioned chair with the cushion on the bottom that felt like rock. It was amazing, he thought, that government-funded agencies - like the Hall of Records they were in - would spend so little time or money in making the place comfortable to patrons. Perhaps they assumed so few people traveled through that it didn't really matter.

That thought was very true; Han had taken a quick walk around the main floor and had found three people and an archive droid among the desks and tables scattered around the building. One of the Bothans seated in the far corner was asleep, his arms crossed above his head to block out light, three datapads on the desk in front of him and one on the floor near his feet.

Maybe they didn't need soft chairs, then.

He sighed and tried again to focus. The datapads in front of him were scrolling and searching through information about military rankage and promotional opportunities in various military corps. He was trying to locate critical information about the Council of Twelve without directly typing in keywords that would trip a search-alarm, if they'd bothered to set one up here.

Then again, if the Chiss was Thrawn, and if he was still with the Imperial Navy, and if he was the one Cracken had said was reuniting the fleet, Thrawn himself would've erased the records. Or alarm-tripped them. Or whatever it was Imps did to hide knowledge about themselves; Han was fine with waving a blaster at their foreheads to get info ... the sneaky stuff was a little beyond what he'd been doing the past few years.

He heard a rustling and raised his head slightly, then heard Leia's click over towards the archivist. Han was in a direct line of sight, though he was also looking through a plant and an in-wall search monitor, and he could _just_ see her shape bustle towards the little white-haired human male, who was completely oblivious to her approach.

Leia reached the edge of the man's desk and said, "Excuse me? Sir?"

The sound of her voice wasn't helping things out, either.

Since when have I ever been like this? He rolled his eyes, staring down at the nearest datapad. I'm not a kid; I can wait.

The archivist's voice was deeper than Han had expected. "Yes?"

"I was wondering if you could do me a favor?" Han heard the vague hint of a smile in her voice.

Han glanced at a datapad at the far corner of his table, eyeing Leia and the man out of the corner of his peripheral vision. The little man looked up and was doing a terrific impression of a Mon Calamari, his eyes enormous and his mouth opening and closing in an effort to get a noise out. "If I can ..."

"Excellent." Leia leaned over his desk and stood on one foot, bending the other behind her just a bit so it was parallel to the floor. "I'm doing a systems analysis for the portmaster. Or - " she sighed, " - that's what I've been _told_ I'm doing. He originally specified that I was to catalogue freight lanes and cargo manifests without using the official records. Which is a bit ridiculous, if you ask me."

The archivist was valiantly trying to look at her face. Han had to give him credit.

"But," and here she dropped her voice and inched her face closer to him, "I think it's some sort of unfair test." She nodded. "That's what I think. I can't _say _anything, because if it is a test, I'll be in trouble for cheating, even though it's impossible to draw up specs when he's not letting me see the official records."

"I see," the little man said.

"So I was hoping you could draw up the records for me using your I.D. If I use mine, I'll be in the system, and he could find out what I did."

"Ah," he said. "I see. Well, I'm not sure - "

"Oh, _please_," Leia said. "Please help me out here. I have to get the report done, but it's _inconceivable_ without these records." Han could tell she was chewing on her lip. "I just need you to access them for me."

"I just don't - "

"Oh, please, sir. _Please_."

There was a sigh, and a slight pause, but then the man agreed, shuffling his way past his desk and moving towards the monitor near Han. Leia clicked after him, and stopped while the archivist entered his information into the screen, then stepped back for her. He told her to take her time and then walked away, and Leia pulled a chair towards the monitor and began clicking through various records.

Ideally, she would head straight towards the port records. If the Imperials were here - and they were both sure they were, based off the Imp in the bar and the strange parade they'd been chased from - the records wouldn't show it. What she was looking at was a public record, after all; no good Imp would lay out their position like that.

But that was all shit they'd anticipated.

Leia was going to look for any inconsistencies, particularly those related to transactions occuring through the portmaster dealing with the shipyards. One of the benefits in using a world like Sluis Van as your own private hidey-hole was that you had plenty of repair parts on hand. Han and Leia knew that there would be no account with the portmaster with the Imperial logo on it, but finding parts that only a Star Destroyer would need ... it should be relatively simple.

They weren't sure what they were going to do with this information, but since they didn't seem to be able to do any on-site survellience of the area without being shot at, this seemed like the best use of time.

Leia was clicking away, pulling screen after screen after screen, occasionally printing out things in hard copy and stashing them in her bag. He gave her an hour before he started packing his datapads up and logging off the servers he was working with. He banged a couple things on the table as he did so, to make it obvious that it was time to go, though when he turned around, fully packed and a step further towards the door, Leia was still staring at the screen, her finger poised above the 'print' option.

_Woman,_ he growled in his head. _Get a move on._

She shook her head slightly, then printed the current page, gathered it all up and walked behind him, far enough away that she wasn't with him, and they left the Hall of Records without any trouble at all. He was surprised. The two of them didn't have much experience with successful plans; usually one of them would have to save the other's neck.

It was kind of a nice change of pace.

The problem was that as they left, separately, he started to feel it again. There was something about Leia working the guy over, leaning and smiling and acting like the woman she wasn't in the slightest. Leia was always confident, and she was always sexual, though she'd never believed that of herself until after they'd gotten together. And it wasn't that he needed her to be different. That wasn't it.

He thought about it to distract himself from acting on the very thing he thought about.

Maybe it was how good she was at the sneaking-around thing. How she could seduce someone like that without really trying. Now, granted, the archivist wasn't exactly a hard mark, but that didn't matter. Leia Organa was so used to being someone in one place and another in another place that these acting gigs she sometimes had to do came as natural to her as breathing.

She'd passed him, clicking away, and he could see her now as he bent his head down and watched her through the gaps in his hair. He admired the slim silleoutte she made, the outfit she'd worn looking more and more like a second skin as she continued down the street. His heartbeat picked up and he shoved his hands in his pockets.

It was like a switch had gone off. Her steps were longer and her hips moved back and forth, the skirt hugging her thighs and her chin tilted high. He knew he'd narrowed his eyes, but he couldn't help it. The heat surged double-time and he kept walking, trying to be nonchalant, trying to ignore her but failing miserably.

She turned a corner, down another street, staying far enough away that he could see her but that he had no hope of catching up to her anytime soon without drawing attention to himself. _Inconspicuous_, he thought to himself. _You are still in somebody's sight._

He forced himself to breathe deeply, exhaling slowly. This was ridiculous.

She turned another corner, and Han was startled to see that she was already entering the lobby of their rundown hotel. Had they been walking that long?

He arrived on their floor after her and watched as she entered their room and left the door open, knowing he was behind her. It was a short walk through their door; he shut it behind him and it fell with a _crack_. She hadn't even made it to the closet yet, her back to him halfway across the room.

It took five steps to wrap his arms around her, another four to drag her back to the wall nearest them, and a rough kind of push to turn her around. Her eyes were glittering but not mischevious; if she'd known how she'd affected him, he saw no proof of it. He put his right hand onto her left shoulder and pushed, wrapping his left around her waist and pressing the length of his body into hers.

The tension was suddenly there; he could feel it. The line of energy that had been running up and down his spine was transferred to hers, and she wrapped her hands around his neck, one sliding into his hair. His skin was electrified, doubly sensitive, and he almost groaned when she pulled him closer to her.

Her lips were at his chin, kissing it softly, then moving down his throat to the line of his shoulders, where she drew his shirt away from his body and tugged her hands underneath the fabric, playing up his spine so that he felt like shivering. He curled his fingers into her waist, pressed her tighter into the wall and kissed her as hard as he could. As the energy passed between both of them, all Han could think was _mine_ and _now_ and he took a second to run his lips over her eyelids before he was back at her mouth.

"All this," she whispered, though there was no one to hear her, "because of the outfit?"

He grunted, pushed her blouse up so he could see the lines of her stomach. Before he knew it, he was on his knees and running his nose from hipbone to hipbone. "All this," he breathed, "because you are _you_ and you don't have to do a_ thing_ to do this to me."

She sighed, her knees shaking as his fingertips danced just above the line of her skirt. "I must've done _something_," she said.

He nodded, fingers moving slowly up the line of her thigh, stopping momentarily to drive her crazy. "You did."

"I_ ignored_ you," she said, her head thrown back, her breathing frantic and louder than her words.

He murmured against her skin, his fingers reaching his goal. She sucked in a breath, arched into his hand. His fingers were playing and drawing little moans and very little coherancy from her, which he found absolutely erotic, and he wasn't sure how much longer he wanted to play this game.

Then she said his name and it didn't matter anymore.

He smiled, stood, bit her earlobe and bullied her over to the bed, where she pulled him down over her and hooked her legs around his waist. _Mine_, he thought. _Mine and mine and mine._

Her blouse annoyed him, so he ran a hand from the top of her skirt to between her breasts, his palm flush to her skin and his head clouded by a hazy sort of delirium. He got rid of the damn shirt, and she worked on his, and he was buried in the senseless oblivion of her body. She pushed him, and he rolled to his back, brushing his fingers along the lines of her thighs.

_Good,_ he thought, when she leaned down to kiss him, her tongue brushing his, her lips sweet and controlling all at once. _She's going to kill me_ ran through his mind when he brushed down her neck and sucked as hard as he could, but he really couldn't find it in him to care.

He spent absolutely no time or thought in removing the rest of her clothes, and if he was reading her right, she didn't with his, either. He waited until she was completely undressed above him, all skin and beautiful, to push her back to the bed, hovering above her. _Her breathing is too quick._ Random thought, shaken away by skin, collarbone, breasts, the feel of her skin, overheated. He could feel himself dissolving into single words, single thoughts, focused entirely on _mine_, and with his last full thought remembered to be careful of her shoulder, unwrapped as it was.

His mind was lost somewhere between the feel of her as he pushed and her fingers tracing down his back. Sighs and the pressure of her nails on his ribs kept him partially focused, but it was all very distant to him because _mine_ and _beautiful_ and _slow_ were tangled up in _push_ and _fuck _and her murmurs and breaths as she hyperventilated. She pushed tight against him, live as a wire, warm as embers.

She ran the edge of release quickly, _fast_, and he began to feel the tightness in his stomach flowing, releasing, his world relegated to an unwrapping coil, blurring at the edges. He pushed faster, harder, and the coil snapped, propelled him into her warmth completely, shaking, a mess of limbs and weight.

_Good,_ he thought. _The best._

Leia, as if sensing his thought, laughed, brushed her fingers up his spine, and said that maybe she'd keep the outfit stashed away for another time.

_The absolute best,_ he thought, before he slid his eyes closed and fell asleep.


End file.
